THE CAVE DOWNWIND OF THE CAFÉ

With this prequel to The Café at the Edge of the Woods (2024), Please provides an entertaining backstory for Glumfoot, the clever, green, pointy-eared front-of-house staff member at Rene’s restaurant.

As it happens, Glumfoot’s green-skinned father is also a chef of sorts, happily stirring up “booger broth” each morning. Their cave is filled with vines and things bulbous, squishy, and strange. And cookbooks. Glumfoot reads one intently, dreaming of “something sweeter.” When Rene opens her business nearby, Glumfoot breathes in the aroma, apparently transported. But a nearby ogre is also intrigued (“I heard humans taste good”), and Glumfoot realizes he must convince the ogre otherwise. “Humans taste like fungus toes! And nasty things up the nose,” he tries. The ruse backfires, only whetting the ogre’s appetite. With some quick thinking, Glumfoot eventually persuades the ogre that humans taste horrid and then redirects the hungry creature and its family to “a little cave where Father makes an oozing, booger broth.” Rene happens to open the door to her establishment just as Glumfoot arrives to raid the bins; she hires him on the spot. Burnt orange and snot-green predominate in Please’s palette, and the antic, animated quality of his linework in these edge-to-edge illustrations informs a cheerful, enchanted landscape of cave and forest.

With luck, this brave, creative foodie’s adventures are just beginning.