How to Potty Train Your Porcupine

My old roommate, Tom Toro, became a cartoonist for "The New Yorker" after college. You can find his work online.

I think my favorite of his cartoons has a cowboy approaching a Wild West saloon. Some barflies are watching. Bizarrely, the cowboy's feet are not visible underneath the doors--those weird half-doors that we tend to envision in Wild West saloons.

So Barfly One draws the only logical conclusion: "THAT is one bow-legged cowboy."

Think about it.

I'm really enchanted by this silliness--I'd love to spend more time with that cowboy--and it's the same kind of silliness you can find in Toro's debut picture book, "How to Potty Train Your Porcupine." This is available now; it's a beautiful book.

The story involves a family eager to adopt a porcupine. But you can't put a diaper on a porcupine; the quills will poke holes in the cloth. This is a particularly intellectual porcupine, so if you set out newspaper for him, he just becomes distracted by the crossword puzzle and forgets to poop.

In my favorite passage, the children try to tame the porcupine's quills. The kids use curlers. Without the pointy quills, we think, the porcupine can just sit right down on the toilet.

But a problem arises: Newly-"curled," the porcupine becomes a kind of beach ball, and he rolls right off the porcelain throne and into the hallway.

All you need, if you want to tell an effective story, is a sense of delight--and this new book has delight in spades. The resolution isn't really important. I'd buy the book for the diaper scene, alone. It's exciting to see a new children's writer in the world.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52880263-how-to-potty-train-your-porcupine

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