Esio Trot

This is easily the shortest "novel" I found among the unpacked box of children's books. At 50 pages or so, it was so short that I considered not even blogging about its completion, which took a whopping 15 minutes. But then I reminded myself that some video games are 80-hour RPGs while others are 2-hour arcade games; some DVDs take 90 minutes to watch while others are 24-hour seasons of television. Since I don't discriminate based on the size of my video games and DVDs, why should I do so with my books? Esio Trot is about a man who loves a woman who loves her tortoise. Did you catch that "Esio Trot" is tortoise spelled backwards? I did not until I was about halfway through the book. It was short, sweet, and, like all Roald Dahl books, full of questionable behavior on the behalf of the protagonist. I have no idea what I was expecting when I started into this one, but it probably involved some sort of twist ending. After all, what short story does not throw you a giant curveball late in the game? Apparently, a children's short story. Kids don't like curveballs. In fact, they don't like pitches of any kind; they're just whacking balls off of tees. As is the case with "batting" in tee-ball, there's nothing unexpected at all thrown at you in this entire mini-book. I feel like I'm already getting close to matching the its length with the length of my entry about it, so I'll wrap this up. The book is nothing special, but it demands only ten or twenty minutes of your time to complete, so it's not like it's something to avoid either.