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The Brave Little Toaster is the Thomas M. Disch novella that became, eventually, a 1987 Disney animated film, and the source material is significantly stranger and more melancholy than the adaptation could afford to be. Five small household appliances (the titular toaster, a vacuum cleaner, a radio, a lamp, and an electric blanket) have been left behind at a summer cottage by the family they belong to, and the appliances decide to set out on foot to find their human.
Disch is using the premise to write a particular kind of fairy tale about love and abandonment that the children's-book form can carry surprisingly well. The animism is genuine. The appliances have real interior lives. The closing scenes touch on planned obsolescence and consumer culture in ways that a 1980 readership might have found unsettling.
The prose is short and elegant and recognizably Disch. Four stars. Recommended to readers of any age, with the warning that the book is sadder than the cartoon.
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