40 honest reviews · 6 essays · read together, at bedtime, out loud
Essay
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 ...
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"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 →Picture it. Your kid is unwrapping a birthday gift from your great uncle Larry, the wrapping paper is in shreds, and there it is in their lap: another copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. That makes four. My son does not smile. He looks ...
Read the post →About 2,922 days ago, I started reading children's books out loud to my kids. That's roughly eight years for the math-challenged. Goodnight Moon enough times to recite it backwards. Hundreds of board books. I did not plan to develop opinions, but here we are.
Read the post →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...
Around the tenth time I read this book to my son, I realized I had become a small theatrical production company. Not a dad reading a book. A one-man show with blocking, dynamic range, and a clear opinion about which syllables to lean int...