SOURCE: Collins, Anne. “The Lessons of Fearful Geometry.” Macleans 94 (22 June 1981): 51.

In the following review of Silverstein's book The Missing Piece Meets the Big O, Collins comments on the moral message of the story.

This [The Missing Piece Meets the Big O] is a funny, ephemeral little picture book, a bit like a 60-second National Film Board short caught on paper. Shel Silverstein has a great talent for anthropomorphizing basic geometric shapes. One thick black wavery line runs through the whole book and out of it grows the saddest triangle (“The missing piece sat alone waiting for someone to come along and take it somewhere”) and a bunch of incomplete circles of varying characters. They meet with the smile-while-your-heart-is-breaking humor of someone reciting a list of fleeting love affairs: “Some fit but could not roll. Others could roll but did not fit.”

The moral is that of geometry run...