My favourite thing here is actually how Chuck wanders off in the middle of the city and while of course his mum is freaked out and the cops make a superfluous appearance at the end in the role of "spectre of social realism," very lightly evoking ministry of children/families investigations etc., at the same time his kookum is not at all fussed and he has a great time just walking around the block looking at cars. It's the world as it should be, a non-hostile environment with kids moving through it like the prov. fish in the pr. wat. But then the book is also drawn in the horrible style I think of as "grimy cartoon," where everything feels like a hot dog covered in hair with a bandaid stuck to it and all the teeth look rotten (somehow, the more so the whiter they are rendered), and that alone is enough to leave me not wanting to revisit this book. ( )