22 honest reviews · 7 essays · read together, at bedtime, out loud
Essay
Earlier this month it was time for my son to visit the doctor and he was almost certainly going to be getting at least one shot. He's been afraid of shots ever since he got a very traumatic one during an emergency room visit (traumatic f...
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One of my favorite parts of the movie "Elf".. actually scratch that. I'm a card-carrying Millennial. ALL of "Elf" is my favorite part. Do you know the part where they are introducing Buddy the Elf's dad Walter Hobbs to the viewers? They ...
Read the post →"Oh I would never read Junie B. Jones to my kids, she's such a bad influence!" If you are a parent of a 5+ child you've probably heard this before. Luckily I didn't hear it before I first started reading the Junie B. Jones series to my k...
Read the post →Every parent wants to get their kid to love reading. Ok, not all parents (no judgement.. mostly), but I'd say it's mostly a consensus that reading is an activity worth pursuing. Video games? That one's still up in the air (I'm pro btw, a...
Read the post →The grumpy-character picture book is now its own genre, and I have read enough of them to fill a small grumpy library. Grumpy bear. Grumpy duck. Grumpy whatever-the-publisher's-illustrator-felt-like-drawing-that-quarter. So when my son h...
I put off Dahl with my daughter longer than I should have. Not because I doubted her (she'd already inhaled Magic Tree House and half the Boxcar Children by then), but because Dahl is weird in a specific way, and I wasn't sure she was re...
I want to talk about the art first because I cannot move past the art. Mark Teague's dinosaurs do something to my brain that I do not like. They are too realistic to be cartoons and too cartoonish to be realistic, and they exist in this ...
There's a logic problem at the center of this book that I cannot stop poking at, the way you can't stop poking a canker sore. It's a book about a bean who is cool in an unconventional way. Which, now that I think about it, is a contradic...
I should probably care about the plot more here. I review books, that's allegedly the job, and there's a perfectly good story in Mr. Tiger Goes Wild about conformity and figuring out who you are. I'll get to it. But I need you to underst...