One Potato Review

This is - not promisingly - a book built around the letters of the alphabet (“Carleton’s curious carousel captivated the colorful crowds”), but it’s also riveting to look at. Fisher photographs a miniature community of toys, and plastic figurines, and paper cut-outs, and many attics’ worth of junk and curiosities - all this against backgrounds (of stoops, and barns, and circus tents, and grocery aisles) that are often just a little unfocussed so as to bring each of these alliterative dioramas even closer to real life. Well, maybe not real, but whatever better vision it was you had in mind when you used to like to play with that dollhouse, that castle, that Playmobile garage. With some wacky, arty touches like a purse with a door and two windows (“Holly was hugely happy in her humble handbag home”) and a vocabulary that is not intimidated by children. In the acknowledgement the artist refers to this “enormously enjoyable endeavor,” which is every bit as fun to leaf through as it probably was to make.