Tor Freeman

The Toucan Brothers are the best plumbers in town, until this fox comes in and outfoxes them for a time, but then everyone comes back to them because he was doing shoddy foxy work and they represent good traditional toucan values of honest craft. Kids' situation comedy by the numbers, underlain by some kind of bad ideology: like, if they had not been the crack* tradesmen that they are, would they have deserved to starve? How does our potted understanding of this situation change if the fox show more is slinging shoddy product in order to pay for his little brother's HIV drugs?

*(little plumber humour there) show less

True friendship, among other things, is pretending to love a truly dreadful gift.

I love the illustrations in this book, but not much else. The messages it sends are all wrong, wrong, wrong. It's okay to abuse your friends if you offer them candy. Candy will make you happy. Being out of candy will put you in a bad mood.

A good moral but it's pretty blunt and didn't give me any tools for similar situations.