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. Where's Spot? read to a kid still small enough to fit in the crook of my arm, lifting that little flap on every single page like it might actually be different this time. Hundreds of board books. Hundreds more picture books. The Berenstain Bear catalogue, for reasons I'll get to. The Magic Tree House series in chunks of five, because my daughter is currently inhaling them at 5am before anyone else is awake.
I did not plan to develop opinions.
It started as the thing you do with an infant in the endless space between nap three and nap four. You crack open a board book about a duck, you point at the duck, you say "duck," and that's the whole interaction. Then one night my daughter laughed for what was probably the first real time, lifting the flap on Where's Spot? because she'd finally figured out the joke. That moment is imprinted on me in a way I can't really describe to anyone who hasn't had it. I knew right then I'd be doing this for a long time. I just didn't know how long. Or what it would do to me.
What it has done is turn into a ritual. Bath. Brush teeth. Run downstairs for an emergency snack. Brush teeth again. Pick a book. Read it. Maybe read it twice. Then maybe a chapter. Then sleep, hopefully. Then sometimes not. Every night. Rain or shine. Busy day or the kind of slow Tuesday where you keep checking the clock to confirm time is in fact still moving forward. When I'm into it. When I'm absolutely not. When they're into it. When they emphatically are not. We do it anyway. That's the deal we made years ago without ever explicitly making it.
Somewhere in there I started developing opinions. Strong ones.
Why is Goodnight Moon a pleasure to read at the end of a long day, but that random book about the train hands you the rhythmic equivalent of a flat tire and asks you to keep going? Why does Fox in Socks make my tongue happy? Why did Dr. Seuss decide to write Green Eggs and Ham using only fifty different words and somehow nail every single one of them, while other books with unlimited word counts can't put together a clean sentence? I don't know the technical answers. I'm not an artist. The closest I've ever come to being a credentialed creative was playing tuba in eighth-grade solo ensemble, and I'm pretty sure I peaked early.
But you cannot read this many books to small children without absorbing some sense of what works. You start to feel which sentences are doing actual work and which ones are filler. You can hear the rhyme break a beat too soon. You can tell when an author wrote the book and when the publisher's marketing department wrote the book. Fox in Socks is what happens when somebody picked the perfect words. The fifty-word constraint of Green Eggs and Ham is, as far as I'm concerned, one of the more impressive feats in twentieth-century writing. I don't care if that's an overstatement. Try writing one good sentence with a vocabulary that small.
And then, somehow, you start doing voices.
I did not set out to do voices. Voices are a contract you sign accidentally and cannot get out of. One night you're trying to keep your kid awake long enough to make it to the end of a chapter and you give the BFG a slightly higher pitch and now the BFG has that voice forever. Now my daughter has strong opinions about whether I got Toad's voice right. Now my son corrects me when I forget which Berenstain Bear sounds like which. I'm running an entire ensemble cast in the dark while trying to remember if I locked the back door. And it's fun. It's actually really fun. I cannot explain this to anyone who doesn't read aloud nightly, but when you nail a voice and your kid giggles in the specific way that means they bought it, the dopamine hit is unreasonable for what just happened, which is that you said some made-up words funny.
Sometimes the kids pick the book and that's that. Same one for the fortieth night in a row. Lord help you if it's a bad one. Sometimes I pick the book. Maybe because it's a joy to read. Maybe because there's a lesson in it that's particularly pertinent at the moment, which is the entire reason the Berenstain Bears exist as a literary genre and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Sometimes because the illustrations are too good not to look at again. Sometimes because it's short and I needed them asleep half an hour ago. The reasoning is allowed to be petty. The kids don't notice and don't care.
So that's the context. That's eight years of unsolicited opinion-forming. Here's why I'm writing it down.
If you've ever tried to look up a children's book online before buying it, you already know the problem. Every review is either a publisher blurb cosplaying as criticism or an Amazon paragraph that reads like it was generated by someone who has never met a child and possibly has never met a book. They are all five stars. They all say the illustrations are vibrant. None of them tell you that the rhyme scheme falls apart on page six and your kid will notice and ask you why. None of them tell you that the protagonist is a deeply unlikable rabbit. None of them tell you that this is a book to read at 7pm and absolutely not at 7:45 when you are trying to wind a small person down and the rhythm of the prose is going to do the opposite of that.
I want to write the reviews I actually want to read.
That means honest. That means the length the book deserves, which is sometimes two paragraphs and sometimes two thousand words. That means telling you when a book is good. When it's bad. And when it's only good because I read it as a kid and my brain has been marinating in nostalgia for thirty years and I can no longer be trusted. I'll flag that last one. I think it's important to flag that one. Plenty of books I loved at seven turn out, when I read them out loud at thirty-eight, to be doing nothing — they were carried entirely by the small version of me who didn't know any better. That's worth saying out loud.
The flip side: when a book is genuinely great, I want to point at it so other parents can find it faster. The good ones are economical in a way most grown-up writers don't have the discipline for. They're built to be performed. They have to land in real time, in front of an audience that will tell you the second you've lost them. When a children's book works, it works at a level most novels can't touch. I'd rather spend the rest of my reading-aloud life pointing those out than re-litigating which Eric Carle book is the most overrated.
So that's what this site is.
Mostly reviews. New picture books. Old picture books. Early readers. The chapter books my daughter is tearing through right now. Whatever my son is roaring his way through this month, which is almost always something with a creature in it. Occasionally posts like this one, where I think out loud about reading aloud as a thing — what it does, why kids ask for the same book seventeen nights in a row, why the bedtime story is one of the strangest little rituals we have and one of the only ones I'd defend with my life.
I will have opinions. I will share them plainly. I do voices when I read aloud and I am not embarrassed about it, and I bring roughly the same energy to writing about these books. I'm not a professional critic. I'm a guy who has read The Very Hungry Caterpillar approximately one billion times and has, against my own better judgment, developed thoughts.
If you'd rather not check the site, there's a weekly email that rounds up whatever I've posted. Goes out on Sundays. That's the whole pitch.
Okay.
Onto the books.