PositiveWall Street JournalThe stories range in tone from the fanciful to the absurd to the philosophical. What they have in common is brevity—Bianchi \'couldn’t afford to make extended long-distance phone calls\'—and a subversive quality that would seem to reflect the author’s communist leanings ... All sorts of imaginative leaps take place in this handsome book, but it is not fare for, shall we say, the masses—the stories tend too much toward the whimsical and arch. It’s an open question whether children ages 4-8 (or the parents who read to them) will have sufficient interest to carry them through to the end.