Hey Everyone! It’s been several days since I posted a review. I’m currently reading The Eggless Club by Eugene Saint. So far, this book is great! I am thoroughly enjoying this work, it’s full of humor, innocence, and intrigue. I’m sharing my reading time with writing the Isle of Elandia Book 2 and papers for my Master’s degree. Stay tuned for a full review of this work, it’s coming soon!
Author: MJ Pankey
MJ is a writer and writing consultant devoted to her muse and to helping other writers gain confidence, overcome obstacles, and unleash the story within. She offers multiple services on her platform, mjpankey.com, and creates helpful content for writers on her youtube channel.
Review of The Troubles of Magnet Boy and Other Gloomy Tales
This is a 140 page book of short poems written by Tom Burleigh and illustrated by Kay Dawson. The listing description reads:
A darkly humored selection of charmingly illustrated story poems.
Tom Burleigh and Kay Dawson rain down misery on their oddball characters, and in doing so have created a book that beautifully blends together melancholy and fun; weirdness and wonder; life and death.
While I agree with this description, it really does not say enough about how great this book is. Though it’s 140 pages, I read it in one sit down. The oddball characters, even though the literal nature of them is quite unlikely, the underlying themes to each of them are very real world and they are something that I believe everyone can relate to in some way, and so as you read through each brief episode you become very connected with these characters. It’s dark, funny, and very well done. The placement of the episodes throughout is perfect. The rhyming is fantastic, and I do not recall a moment when I had to reread a sentence because it didn’t flow right with the rest of the poem, which is very rare in my experience with poetry. It is very easy to understand, unlike a lot of poetry which is almost too abstract to fully grasp, yet it says has so much more meaning behind it than the actual words on the page.
These poems are written to read like a children’s story, but they are definitely not for children in my opinion. The underlying nature of the stories are a bit too deep and dark for children to understand, but to me this just adds to the brilliance of the work. Think Dr. Seuss for grownups. I highly recommend this book for anyone who enjoys creative stories with deep meaning and exceptional flow.
This book is available on amazon.com for purchase on Kindle only. I am slightly disappointed that I can not purchase a hard copy of this book to add to my library, but it is worth the read despite. This listing can be purchased here:
The Troubles of Magnet Boy and Other Gloomy Tales
Check it out, you will definitely not be disappointed. Thank you for reading!