I'm a millennial dad in the Pacific Northwest. I have a daughter who's eight and a son who's four, and I have been reading to both of them every night for somewhere north of 2,900 nights. That's a number with a comma in it. It is also, depending on how you look at it, either a very specific qualification or a deeply concerning amount of free time spent with picture books. This is the site where I write down what I think about the books we read.
Nobody asked me to do this. The opinions accumulated on their own. Once you've read The Very Hungry Caterpillar something like a thousand times, you start to notice things — which sentences are doing actual work, where a rhyme breaks a beat too soon, why one book turns the end of the day into a small joy and another makes you stare at the ceiling fan and quietly contemplate the slow-motion collapse of your own faculties. I'm not a credentialed critic. I'm a guy who has been performing children's literature out loud, in the dark, to a small skeptical audience for eight straight years. That is its own kind of qualification.
Where I'm coming from
I grew up in the 80s and 90s on Roald Dahl, E.B. White, Shel Silverstein, Gary Paulsen, Beverly Cleary, and whatever Choose Your Own Adventure books my library would let me check out five at a time. A lot of those books are still on the shelf at my house. Some of them hold up better than I expected. Some don't. Part of what I'm doing here is being honest about the difference, because the version of me at seven did not have great quality control and I am no longer obligated to defend his taste.
I'm not trained in children's literature. I'm not a teacher, librarian, or child development specialist, and I won't pretend to be. What I have is volume — eight years of nightly reading, hundreds of picture books, dozens of chapter book series, the entire Berenstain Bear catalogue, the Magic Tree House series in chunks of five, every Shel Silverstein collection on rotation. After enough hours of reading aloud to a small audience that will tell you the exact second they've lost interest, you develop a sense for what works. That sense is what I'm working with.
What I review
Board books, picture books, early readers, chapter books, occasional poetry collections. Roughly birth through about twelve. New releases when I get to them. Old standbys when I want to test whether they hold up. If a book has been read aloud in our house, it's eligible. I review books because they're great, because they're so bad I needed to write it out of my system, or because one of my kids asked for it seventeen nights in a row and I started developing thoughts.
How the reviews work
Every full review breaks a book down on six criteria. They aren't arbitrary — they're the things I actually pay attention to when I'm reading aloud and trying to figure out whether a book earns its place on the shelf:
- Writing quality — is the prose doing actual work, or is it filler dressed up in nice fonts?
- Read-aloud fun — does it land when performed? Some books are designed for it. Many are not.
- Holds up on re-reads — the hidden killer. Most books that look great on a first read fall apart by night fifteen.
- Kid engagement — does my actual child want to keep going, or are they negotiating an exit?
- Message and values — is the book teaching anything, and is it teaching the right thing?
- Dad Survival Rate — how many readings I can do in a row before I start narrating in the voice of a dying Victorian clergyman just to entertain myself.
And then a five-star verdict on top. Five stars is a classic — the kind of book I'd stand outside your house at night until you read. Four is genuinely great. Three is fine; I don't resent reading it. Two is "I'm quietly relocating this to the bottom of the pile." One is "I've hidden it behind the couch so we can't find it."
I also flag, in plain English, when nostalgia is doing the heavy lifting on a rating. It often is. A book I loved at seven is sometimes a book that was carried entirely by the smaller, dumber version of me, and saying that out loud is part of the deal.
How I work
I read every book I review. That sounds obvious. It would not occur to me to mention it except that an alarming amount of children's-book content online appears to have been written by people who have not. I buy the books myself. I do not accept comp copies from publishers. I do not run sponsored posts dressed up as reviews. I do not accept payment to say nice things about books. If a link on the site is an affiliate link, it'll be marked, and the link wouldn't change a word of the review even if it doubled my income — which, for the record, it does not.
If I get something wrong, I want to know. If I missed a book that deserves a review, I want to know that too. The contact page has the email. Corrections get fixed. Recommendations go on the queue.
Who this is for
Parents who read to their kids and want an honest opinion before clicking the buy button. Grandparents looking for a book that isn't a third copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Teachers and librarians who like seeing what an obsessive parent thinks of the books their kids bring home. Anyone who wants to remember what they read when they were eight and figure out whether it actually was as good as they remember.
The voice
Dry, opinionated, occasionally funny, occasionally not. I do voices when I read aloud and I bring roughly the same energy here. I will not call a book "whimsical." I will not describe an illustration as "vibrant." I will tell you when a rhyme scheme breaks, when the dialogue feels written by an adult who hasn't talked to a child in fifteen years, and when a book is doing something rare. The good ones are economical in a way most adult books can't manage — they're built to be performed in front of an audience that tells you the second you've lost them. When a children's book works, it works at a level most novels can't touch. I want to keep pointing at those.
The newsletter
One email every Sunday morning with that week's reviews. No spam. No "10 Books Your Child Must Read Before Kindergarten." One-click unsubscribe in every email. Sign up on the homepage.
How to reach me
Email me at hello@bookishdad.com, or use the contact page. I read everything that comes in. I respond to most of it. Eventually.
I'm also on Reddit as u/Bookish-Dad, mostly commenting in parenting and children's-book subs when someone asks for a recommendation and I have one.
Every book I review also gets a rating on Goodreads, if you prefer tracking things there.