Every book I've reviewed so far, newest first. 52 reviews and counting. The ones with a gold star next to them are the ones I'd press into your hands at a bookstore.
Somewhere around the third bedtime, my daughter stopped me mid-sentence and asked how much a train ticket to New York costs now. Not in a dreamy way. In a way that wanted a number. When I said I didn't know, maybe forty bucks, she asked ...
I read this at maybe thirteen, in a beanbag chair in a friend's basement, and I remember closing it and feeling like someone had taken something away from me and refused to give it back. Not a bad feeling. A real one. I'd spent my whole ...
I knew what was coming. That's the thing about this book if you grew up when I grew up. You do not read Bridge to Terabithia cold as a 41-year-old. You carry it around for thirty years like a stone in your coat pocket, and then one night...
I read the chapter about the school being built sideways, thirty stories tall with one classroom on each floor, and I felt my whole brain reorganize itself. Not because it's confusing. Because it isn't. Sachar just states the wrong thing...
I put off Dahl with my daughter longer than I should have. Not because I doubted her (she'd already inhaled Magic Tree House and half the Boxcar Children by then), but because Dahl is weird in a specific way, and I wasn't sure she was re...
I read most of this book thinking I had it figured out, which is exactly what Louis Sachar wanted me to think, and I want to file a formal complaint about how cleanly he got me. I've read a lot of kids' books at this point (the number is...
I put off reading this one for years because the cover made me assume it was going to be precious. Big-eared mouse, soft palette, Newbery sticker glinting up at me like a warning that I was about to have my feelings managed. I was wrong ...
I went in braced for a dog book. You know the genre. The one where you can see the last chapter coming from page nine, where the whole enterprise is a slow machine for making an eleven-year-old cry into a golden retriever. I had my defen...
I read this in sixth grade and it rearranged something. I want to be careful with that sentence, because adults say books changed them all the time and usually they mean it gave them a vibe. This one did the actual thing. I closed it as ...
I have been dreading the WWII conversation since my daughter was about five. Not the dates and the maps. The other part. The part where a kid figures out what people are actually capable of, and you have to decide how much of that you ha...
I read Hatchet at ten and decided the most important skill a human could possess was making fire without a match. I never tested this theory. Important context, because what I am about to tell you is that Island of the Blue Dolphins is t...
I went in braced for disappointment. You know the kind: everyone swears it's a classic, and then it reads like homework with a nice cover. Instead I got two weeks of my daughter going to bed without complaint because she wanted the next ...
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 want to give you an honest summary of this book, and I can't. I finished it for what I'm fairly sure was the 22nd time about five minutes before sitting down to write this, and the plot has already evaporated out of my skull like steam...
The internet has decided that The Rainbow Fish is a referendum on socialism, and I want to go on record saying that I do not care, not even slightly, and that I think both sides of that argument have far too much time. You can find essay...
I'm going to say something I have never researched and will stand by anyway: Pete the Cat is the most polarizing franchise in the entire children's section. I have seen the disdain in other parents' eyes. The premises are ridiculous, Pet...
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...
I will say the quiet thing out loud: Llama is kind of annoying. Not in a way that ruins the book. In a way that is, honestly, the entire point. He whines, he stalls, he doesn't want to give an inch, and when something finally goes sidewa...
Every parent has a version of the move Mama Llama pulls in this book. You're tired, you've asked nine times, nobody is listening, and somewhere in your exhausted brain a little voice says: what if I just let it ride? What if I stopped do...
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 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...
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 lean an inch close...
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...
Penguins sell books. This is a thing I have learned not by reading marketing reports but by standing in a library with two children who saw a penguin on a cover and started negotiating like hostage takers. I did not check a single review...
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...
My daughter doesn't cry at books. She sat stone-faced through Charlotte's death. She told me "it's raining" when I wept at The Giving Tree. She caught the symbolism in Phantom Tollbooth before I did and delivered her observations like sh...
Here is a thing I have come to accept about parenting in the 2020s: there is a small handful of picture books that have achieved the cultural saturation that Where the Wild Things Are and Goodnight Moon had when I was a kid. Books that s...
I am, by temperament, suspicious of sequels. A sequel to a beloved picture book is usually a cash grab with the same color palette, a forced premise, and a publisher's marketing meeting hanging visibly off every page. You can feel the co...
I was seven years old, sitting on the brown carpet of my elementary school library, and I distinctly remember the moment I realized adults had been lying to me about what poetry was. Poetry, I had been told, was a thing where you sat ver...
My daughter found this on a bottom shelf at the library, held it up, and said "is this the one with the kids who live in the train?" I have no idea where she absorbed that. The internet, probably. The collective unconscious of every kid ...
My daughter brought this home from the school library, set it on the kitchen counter face-down like it was contraband, and then read the whole thing in roughly the time it takes me to fold one load of laundry. When I asked her about it s...
My son spent twenty minutes last Tuesday lying face down on the kitchen floor because his banana broke in half. Not split, not bruised, broke. He had peeled it himself, which is a power he loves to exercise, and somewhere between his fis...
I want to be clear that I am not a Christmas Eve crier. I am a man who makes coffee in the morning and reads to his kids at night and does the BFG voice with a level of commitment that should embarrass me but doesn't. I am not, generally...
I had not thought about Corduroy in roughly thirty years until my son pulled it off a library shelf last fall, held it up like he had discovered a relic, and said "this one." He didn't know what it was. He just liked the bear's face. We ...
So, about E.B. White. I have spent my entire adult life telling people that Charlotte's Web is the best children's book ever written, full stop, do not argue with me, and I will cry on command to prove it. I have spent approximately none...
My daughter, who you may recall does not cry at Charlotte's Web and informed me it was "raining" while I sobbed through The Giving Tree, sat up halfway through chapter two of The Witches and said, in the flat tone of a small woman delive...
Here is a true thing about being a parent in 2026 and reading a Roald Dahl book out loud to a four-year-old: you will hit the second paragraph and realize, with a small internal lurch, that you forgot how this one opens. The opening of J...
My son drew on the wall last Tuesday. Not a small drawing. A committed, full-arm, ankle-to-shoulder mural in the hallway, done in marker that the package had sworn to me, in writing, was washable. I stood there in my socks holding a mug ...
My son has requested "Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me Too" every single night since the second week of February. I am writing this in late April. You do the math, and then sit with what that math means for me as a human being who used to ...
One thing nobody mentions about The Phantom Tollbooth: if you didn't read it as a kid, reading it for the first time as an adult is a slightly humiliating experience. I missed this book. Somehow. In a childhood spent inhaling Dahl and Si...
In January my daughter was still grinding through BOB Books like they were tax forms. By February she was reading a Magic Tree House book under the covers with a flashlight at 6:14 a.m. I know it was 6:14 because that's when the cat knoc...
The last time I read this book out loud, I made it to the final page and my voice did that thing where it goes up half an octave and you sound like a man trying to talk through a wet sock. My daughter, eight years old, stoic as a small Q...
My daughter requests "The Letter" by name. She has done this since she was six, sitting cross-legged on the rug saying "the letter one, the letter one" in the exact tone other kids use for ice cream. I don't know what Arnold Lobel did in...
For about three months when my son was around two, this was the only book in the house. We owned two hundred others; as far as he was concerned they were furniture. He requested it daily. DAILY. He would pull out the caterpillar, hand it...
I am supposed to feel awe about Where the Wild Things Are. What I actually feel is a kind of polite, low-grade admiration, like I'm walking past a famous painting in a museum and nodding at it on my way to the gift shop. I know this is t...
I read this in third grade and I have done The Voice ever since. You know the voice. The big rumbly half-confused gentle one, slightly West Country if you squint, with the consonants in the wrong order half the time. I have been doing Th...
I read this book as a kid and it broke me. I read it again last month, out loud, to my 8-year-old, and it broke me again, in exactly the same place, in approximately the same way, while my daughter sat next to me with the expression of a...
I didn't grow up with Mo Willems. He arrived in my life the way most great things do as an adult: a friend handed me one, said "trust me," and walked away. My daughter was three. I read it once. I read it again because she asked. By the ...
I have read this book somewhere in the neighborhood of four hundred times, and I can still feel my heart rate drop on the second page. That is not a figure of speech. There is something in the cadence of this thing that works on me the w...
I read Matilda for the first time in 1991. I was seven, sitting on a brown carpet in a house that smelled like my mom's coffee, and I remember finishing the last page and just sitting there for a while because I did not know what to do w...