The Ole Switcheroo

We are big fans of both Mac Barnett (Sam & Dave Dig a Hole, Just Because, The Future Book) and X. Fang (Dim Sum Palace, We are Definitely Human, Broken), and so when we learned these two were teaming up on a new release, Tom Nancy (Tundra Books, 2026), we were eager to get our hands on it. It didn’t disappoint.

Tom Nancy is a devious talking sheep who lures docile Felix, the farmer’s son, into trying out a brain swapping machine conveniently and unexplainably sitting in the old barn on the hill. 

Bing! The machine works!

Tom Nancy enjoys a glorious day as a human kid playing and eating sandwiches while Felix has a pleasant time grazing grass in the meadow. But when they meet up in the evening to swap back, fiendish Tom Nancy decides he wants to stay human, leaving Felix stuck in the pasture.

This is the semi-absurd, semi-horrific stuff of childhood nightmares. Felix watches in despair as Tom Nancy steals his life—eating his dessert, kissing his mother, walking to school with his friends—powerless to stop him.

But then Barnett pulls another switch. Tom Nancy learns that being a kid is not all sandwiches and self-indulgence: kids have to do homework and chores all in preparation for an adult future of endless “paper, paper, paper” and “work, work, work.”

Desperate now to switch back, Tom Nancy hurries back to the barn only to find that Felix has decided he prefers the pastoral life and has taken matters into his own hands.

The trickster of this modern fairytale has been tricked. Barnett is tapping into something adult and child readers alike feel deeply: being a human is hard and comes with a lot of thankless work. Sometimes (often) being an animal with no responsibilities seems like a much sweeter deal. The grass looks greener in the pasture. The true horror of this story is not a botched science experiment—it’s adulthood. 

X. Fang’s illustrations lend themselves well to this Young Frankensteinian comedy-horror. Her colored-pencil style brings a particular texture, roundness, and depth to the pictures, and the opening panels cleverly play like the first scenes of an old scary movie building to a dramatic title sequence.

As is clear in just these few spreads, Fang draws facial expressions like no one else. Felix’s horrified gape and Tom Nancy’s sly grin are cartoonishly big and perfectly in the tone of the story. These expressions hint at the twist from the beginning: Felix’s face—incredulous, round-eyed, slack-mouthed—was always ovine, while Tom Nancy’s smirk makes more sense on a distempered, disillusioned human adult.

And disillusioned he certainly is. That  grimace never goes away throughout his miserable future of pushing paper. Felix gets his happily ever after in the fields, while Tom Nancy gets his just deserts after all.