Everything is the opposite today

How interesting life is arranged. No soldier has as many commanders as an ordinary schoolboy does. At home, parents are in charge. At school - teachers. However, some things are still allowed for children. They are allowed to be polite,... obedient, quiet, modest, diligent - that is, actually convenient and inconspicuous. But the heroes of Yuri Tomin's stories are completely different.
The witty dreamer Kostya Shmel from the story "Borka, Me and the Invisible Man" constantly drives teachers to a nervous breakdown. However, as his dad says, it is not Kostya himself to blame, but the invisible man inside him who pushes the boy to bad deeds. Three friends from "Everything is the opposite today" - Slavyk, Yurka, and Galka - challenge their parents. The heroes of Siberian novellas and stories - Vitka Murashov and Yura Alenov - are tireless dreamers whose souls thirst for real adventures. But the discoveries they are about to make relate not so much to geography as to growing up and finding themselves. Equally interesting transformations occur with the heroes of the author's stories.
The novellas of Yuri Tomin have repeatedly served as the basis for films (in 1982, a film titled "It All Started with the Cat..." was released based on the novella "Everything is the opposite today," directed by Yuri Oksanchenko) and have been illustrated multiple times. The stories in this collection are accompanied by works from well-known masters of book graphics from St. Petersburg - Sergey Spitsin and Leonty Selizarov.