Carmen Dog: A Review by Nymeth

Carol Emshwiller is very funny – funny in a straight-faced, ironic way that reminded me a little of Margaret Atwood. And being funny, of course, doesn’t mean that this isn’t a serious book with very frightening implications. The fact that it’s a humorous fantasy might make it possible for us to distance ourselves from what’s happening in a way that a more realistic story about cruelty, discrimination, powerlessness and subjugation wouldn’t allow. But then again, it also allows Carol Emshwiller to take it to places where a realistic story wouldn’t go—and this is why I love fantasy. The harshness is there all the same, and there are things to be learned from this distance. If you look beyond the surface, it's really as disturbing as The Handmaid's Tale.

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Matthew Cheney on Mister Boots

Get yourself to the children's aisle, because Mister Boots is one of Carol Emshwiller's most satisfying books, which is to say it is a novel of skill and beauty and sadness and love, which is to say it is the sort of book that brings depth to our lives. It is being marketed as something for kids, and that is a good thing, because kids need this book, but so do those of us who are busily trying to digest our inner children into post-industrial waste.

The title character is a man who is also a horse. He escapes from his fellow horses and is found, naked and human, by the novel's narrator, a ten-year-old girl named Bobby who lives as a boy. Bobby's father was a stage magician who took his frustrations out on the backs of his wife and children with a whip, but who ran away from the family after growing horrified at all he had done. He returns when Bobby's mother dies, shortly after Mister Boots and Bobby's older sister Jocelyn have fallen in love, and they all head off for adventures on the road, until the dust storms of unfettered capitalism blow into the Great Depression, and the stage magician can't make his angers disappear.

The plot's rivets make the book a quick read, but the themes beneath the actions transform it into art.

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