The Future of Giraffes is the middle book of Tarnawsky's Placebo Effect Trilogy, five mininovels at the center of a fifteen-mininovel cycle, and the only one of the three given over entirely to childhood. The form was Tarnawsky's own invention: short prose built on what he called "negative text," gaps of vital information the reader is obliged to supply, so that finishing the book means becoming its co-author.

That demand is most explicit here, and childhood is its proving ground. A boy naps during a family picnic and wakes alone in the world. A cognitively impaired savant boy decides he has had enough and trudges off toward his grave. A boy is forced to leave his hometown of Blood City after his mother's funeral. Another is imprisoned in a quarry for a barbarous experiment of survival. A last one dreams of turning into a rat to hide in a wall once his parents are gone. The dread that runs through the trilogy, alienation, abandonment, the fear of death, is here drawn at a child's scale.

It follows Like Blood in Water and precedes View of Delft; of the three, it is the one in which Tarnawsky lets the omissions sit closest to the body of the reader.