4 out of 5

This is a cute lil’ illustrated book / zine that was gifted to me, although I see it is sold from the Cartoon Museum. Essentially, this uses the anthropomorphic flip-flop suggested by its title to kinda sorta tell how to care for cactuses. It lays out some general rules for its Cacti-people to raise people-people as plants: putting them in pots, watering, etc. It’s super cute, with care put into the end pages, the font, and color choices. An example of the latter: using logically green covers to attract its Cacti readers, but then the contents are mostly human skin-colored, as it’s “about” humans. Reds and blues are nice accents that pop out from those two bases.

Very much a kids book, but it has the kinda of winky humor we’d associate with old school illustrators like Maurice Sendak – stuff that works for adults as well. That said, in the book’s attempts to quickly cover some human history and habits, it mentions our having evolved from water creatures – gasp! evolution! – and is pretty binary in terms of gender and hints at human’s sexual preferences. (Nothing kinky, just a one line suggestion that putting a male and female together might result in other humans, with a heart above the 100% innocent illustration.) Is that… a big deal? Why am I bothering to mention it? I dunno; it was mentioned in the book, so it feels fair game to point it out, because that stuff didn’t have to be mentioned at all, and is just a “heads up” for those wanting to put this into their Cacti-related curriculum; a general “this was written in 2016” proviso.