DONUT NOVEL

A doughnut shop employee makes plans for an art museum and observes the lives of cartoon mice in this quirky novella.

Former high school art teacher Chicken McNugget gets hired at the local doughnut shop. He works alongside and immediately befriends Tonya, who’s enthusiastic about his ideas: Chicken dreams up an art museum that will ostensibly showcase different artists, hiding the fact that the displayed works will be his own creations. Surprisingly, his manager, Rufus, suggests making the shop part of the museum. So, Chicken works on his art pieces as Tonya drafts bios for the nonexistent artists. Meanwhile, a family of cartoon mice unexpectedly appears in Chicken’s basement room. While some of the mice attend a comedy school, where they learn how to write jokes, others train hard in the army. Bad Rat is stirring up trouble in the mouse community, not unlike the “rude” customers whom Chicken, Tonya, and others must contend with at the doughnut shop. The author serves up a buffet of amusing morsels—for example, Chicken’s unpredictable co-worker, Smitty, who sprints into traffic to chat with a potential customer, needs a job coach by his side. Some aspects of the narrative are absurdist—the antics of the mice; Chicken forms a union that his boss and several customers join—while other parts are relatable, like an orange slushie being a handy stress reliever for Chicken. The work is inconsistent in general; it’s initially stylized as a journal (with each chapter representing a journal entry), but this approach is quickly abandoned. Characters receive only scant descriptions (Tonya is introduced as having “a streak of blue in her hair”), and a scene featuring a supposed variety of “imaginary animals” comes down to cartoon mice riding therapy dogs. Still, the novella has hints of diverting fantasy and a gratifying ending that befits its overall tone.

This compact, delightfully eccentric story has a tendency to meander.