Last Tuesday I was standing in the dark next to my son's bed, holding a board book about a truck, and I realized I had been reading it on autopilot for what was probably the fourth pass through. He had asked for it again. I said yes the way you say yes when you've already said no twice and you're trying to get downstairs before the coffee gets cold and the dishwasher needs unloading and the whole adult day catches up with you. And as I was reading I was also, somewhere in the back of my head, composing a small mental review of the truck book. Pacing issues. The dump truck section drags. The crane spread is the best one and they put it too early. I caught myself doing this and thought, okay, this is a problem, or it's a hobby, and either way I should probably do something with it.
So here we are. This is the site where I do something with it.
I'm a dad in the Pacific Northwest. I have a daughter who is eight and a son who is four. I read to both of them every night, and have for as long as either of them can remember, which means our house has the book accumulation of a small regional library run by someone with no acquisition policy. Some of these books are genuinely great. Some of them are fine. A non-trivial number of them make me want to walk into the ocean fully clothed. Most of them fall somewhere in between, and figuring out which is which is more interesting than I expected it to be when I started paying attention.
Why this exists
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, or that the protagonist is a deeply unlikeable rabbit, or 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.
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 marinated 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.
What you'll find here
Mostly reviews. New picture books, old picture books, early readers, the chapter books my daughter is currently inhaling at five in the morning before anyone else is awake, and whatever my son is roaring his way through this month (it 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.
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. It goes out on Sundays. That's the whole pitch.
Okay. Onto the books.