I was killing time, waiting for a movie to start in Glendale. There was a bookstore nearby, and I thought I would go look in there.
“Hello There!” A man in a baseball cap sat at a small table right inside the doorway smiled big. “I’m doing a book signing! Would you like one? Here: The Adventures of Rodney Appleseed”
He handed me a book with a color cover. “Oh, It’s fiction!” I said, “Fiction is hard.”
“Thank you for saying that,” he said. “Not everyone understands that.”
We talked for a moment about whether Rodney Appleseed had anything to do with Johnny Appleseed. Then I decided to buy the book.
“It’s like nothing else you’ve ever read, ” the author said.
“Don’t say that!” I told him. “I’ve read a lot of books.”
Thank you, Ross Anthony, author. I’ve read it. Now I can tell everyone about it.
—————
The Infinite Adventures of Rodney Appleseed
By Ross Anthony
The hero of this book, Rodney Appleseed, might be just any boy with a preponderous ability to ask questions. But if he were, his adventures would not be infinite. And when you get a bit into the book you realize that infinity is an essential part of Rodney’s adventures.
Anthony tells his story with the kind of quirky irony found in The Phantom Tollbooth . He has a message, a kind of moral to the story, similar to Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
Which is not to imply that the book is in any way derivative. The whole thing was quite original, and a pleasure to read.
Anthony obviously loves the fact that as the author he can do anything he wants in his book. He twists and contorts the impossible and the plausible, having his characters do impossible things that make absolute sense. It makes the reader think about the possible things that are done in real life that make no sense. The book encourages its readers to ask questions and take chances in order to reach their dreams.
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