Finally! It's about time someone marketed her insecurity complex. Whenever I worry that I'm worthless, untalented and socially inept, all I need to do is read a book like "Miss Remarkable and Her Career" to reassure myself that the American economy has room for people even more incompetent than I am. Seriously, I'm getting tired of uninformative, whimsical books with titles like "Forty Reasons Why Life is More Fun After the Big 40," or "Meditations for Cats Who Do Too Much." It doesn't seem right that the rainforest is being torn up for nuggets of wisdom like, "being over forty means products you bought with a lifetime guarantee begin to wear out." But I stray from reviewing this book, which, aside from being the final step to Miss Dranger's emotional recovery, is also charmingly illustrated.

The protagonist, Miss Remarkable, is born to successful parents who espouse standard formulae for achievement. Her hysterical mother shrieks that she must be "normal-extraordinary." Her father explains that one must be in the "top ten," lest they become "nobody, nobody at all."

After her father leaves on a space rocket, Miss Remarkable enters an artless corporate world, having learned that in order to achieve, she must overachieve, and unless she's perfect, she'll fail. Guess what-she fails! Aww. But guess what again-she realizes that that's okay! Yay!

Luckily, the drawings are better. At first I was annoyed with their daintiness, but I eventually decided that they provide much-needed irony. The author is a self-proclaimed "squiggler" (an accurate description). The lines are bold and slippery. The people look like they were squeezed out of fabric paint tubes, their heads squeezed out of their necks.

The high-contrast drawings, alternating black-on-white with white-on-black, would give you a headache if they weren't sometimes broken up by shading. Maybe that's why the Night Monster, the demon of Miss Remarkable's insecurity, is my favorite character. He's a dopey-looking lump of fuzz, who, if he had a rounded beak, would be the creature from Edward Gorey's "The Doubtful Guest." Night Monster only occasionally appears in full figure, but you know he's there whenever fuzziness eats into the picture from the border of the page. As Miss Remarkable's emotional stability declines, her lipstick thickens, her grin strains, her limbs grow flaccid and the demon pervades even more of the page.

Yes, it's cutesy. The sun is smiling in every window. The women's eyelashes look like caterpillars. It's all supposed to look like kid's doodles, but don't be fooled-the peoples' postures, varied and expressive, reveal a more adult hand. The black spray-usually around the protagonist's eyes, clouding over her entire body when she's particularly tormented with self-doubt, really does give an inkling (pun intended) of what serious depression feels like. The book is intended to be bittersweet and optimistic.

If you're sad that you're not perfect, perhaps identifying with Miss Remarkable will be therapeutic for you. But frankly, the only moral of this story seems to be that for $13, you can sell your depression to other depressed people.