The Boxtrolls is a wonderful children's story that, among other things, show kids how awful it is to stereotype and scapegoat others.
Boxtrolls starts with a scenario that sounds a lot like many other dystopias. The above ground society, the Cheese Bits, are terrified of the underground society, the Boxtrolls.
The Boxtrolls literally live underground; They eat insects and use odds and ends from the world above them to make things like a music maker. A manhole is a portal to and from worlds.
Because they are terrified of the Boxtrolls, the Cheese bits and their secret police, the Red Hats, hunt the Boxtrolls as monsters. The White Hats, who govern the Cheese bits, support the Boxtrolls hunts. One of the Cheese bit, a baby, was kidnapped and killed by the Boxtrolls. But was the Trubshaw baby really taken?
Eggs doesn't think so. He knows the Boxtrolls aren't monsters. Eggs knows this because he lives with them, They are his friends who assure him his peach skin is fine even though theirs is green or grey.
Eggs feels ok about his appearance until a girl who lives above ground, Winne Portley-Rind, calls him a name he never heard before, "boy."
Readers who like stories about odd characters who find themselves in strange situations, will love this new collection by Rivka Galchen.
As strange as the characters are, though, it's easy to relate to them.Who hasn't felt what this character in "The Lost Order" feels so keenly?
"But one day I woke up and heard myself saying, I am a fork being used to eat cereal. I am not a spoon. I am a fork. And I can't help people eat cereal any longer."
After a strange caller angrily denounces her for a missing Chinese take-out order, the narrator of "The Lost Order," comes to some startling conclusions about her marriage and herself.
"The Region of Unlikeness," is about another lost soul who befriends two eccentric intellectuals at a coffee shop. She is secretly attracted to one of them and repelled by the other.
"American Innovations" bravely tackles magical realism, body image, and deformity.
"Wild Berry Blue," is a wonderful coming-of-age story about a girl who has a crush on an ex-junkie who works at her favorite McDonalds.
In one story, "Once Upon an Empire," a likable but possibly deranged narrator, loses all of her belongings. No one steals them; instead, in a magical realism way, they become mobile and literally walk away from her apartment.
She finds them in a dumpster but is reluctant to identify them to the police.
Less successful stories included in this collection are "Dean of the Arts" or "The Late Novels of Gene Hackman."
Galchen's collection was long-listed for the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize.