Latest review: Llama Llama Gram and Grandpa → Read it
The first time I read this one I thought it was a cute book about a lion in a library, which is how I think about most books on the first read, like a man squinting at the surface of a pond. There's a head librarian, Miss Merriweather, w...
There is a particular feeling a parent gets when the grandparents offer to take the kid overnight, and it is roughly the feeling of a man who has just been told his prison sentence has been commuted. You hand over the child. You hand ove...
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 ...
My daughter recognized herself in Ramona on, I think, the second page. I could see it happen. She did the small thing she does when something on the page hits her, which is not flinch, not smile, not say anything, just go very still and ...
I was ten years old when I first read Hatchet, and within about a week of finishing it I had stolen a chunk of flint from the rock collection at school and was crouched in our backyard banging it against the back of a butter knife trying...
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 →