Juan Mateo

This is a beautiful book, an adult picture book where the formatting, the extra transparent pages, and the pop-ups are as much part of the work as the words themselves.

The stories are short, and simple, and full of messages like 'your real treasure is your family', and 'being angry hurts people', and just in case you don't get them, they have little book-club-esque epilogues, explaining the point.

I don't know if I like it or not. Simple is very near to trite. I was lent the book when I was very sad, with the recommended story whose moral is 'everything you do in life, you do because you chose to do it'. It made me very angry at the time. But I think there is a lot of truth in simple trite wisdom, and it is good to be reminded of it.

And then it ends with a breaking-the-forth-wall slangy story saying not to trust beautiful stories where everything is simple because they're not true!… (mere)