How To Make Life Better When It Feels Like It's Getting Worse h/c back

Page 45 Comibook Of The Month October 2025

“I hope I didn’t build that up too much.
“I think I should have introduced myself first.
“I don’t really know how you’re supposed to do this.”

Simone Lia has worked out precisely how to do this and it’s very far from obvious.

Everything I wholeheartedly adore about this deceptively complex, subtly robust yet endearingly dippy, kind and stunningly beautiful book is embedded at the end – like a Rosetta Stone lobbed ever so casually over a departing shoulder – in Nanna’s letter of humbly submitted and emphatically solicited advice to her adopted bunny-grandchild.

The key is presaged in Nanna’s fable about trees which, without wind when growing indoors, won’t withstand other set-backs. Oh, and Fluffy’s formula for an inspirational transformation story.

“I’m going to pretend to type now.”

Fluffy can’t type because Fluffy is a bunny. And in a human world that can be quite challenging. It’s not easy being adorable. Kids and adults alike wanted to pick him up and stroke his silky ears. Fluffy didn’t react well to this and started to become a lot less adorable.

Like all of us, Fluffy had a lot of growing up to do, and a lot left to experience. Fluffy began to write a povel. Not a novel, nor a graphic novel, but a -- I’ll let Fluffy explain that one. And everything else: this is after all his story, not mine.

“I’ll tell you after I’ve had a wee. I bet there are no toilets in this forest. I don’t know why my dad brought me here. The countryside is so overrated.”

Wherever he wanders will be beautiful, whether Fluffy can see that or not. Never has ‘background’ seemed so apposite for though Fluffy is at one with his environment, he pops out of the page, bright white and orange against drop-dead gorgeous, warm slate blues. Lia infuses the sometimes scrubby suburbs of South East London (constantly under construction, repair and reconstruction; insurgent weeds, temporary railings and traffic cones abound) with as much spirit of place as Simon Gane does the white stone / sandy crags of Greece in SUNBURN, or Paul Madonna the whole of San Francisco in ALL OVER COFFEE etc.

Just stunning.