19 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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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 →Before kids, I never once thought about myself as a performer. While I may have (definitely did) nail my lines as Narrator #2 in my 6th grade class presentation of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," I've never considered myself particularly go...
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 →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 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...