Every book I've reviewed so far, newest first. 21 reviews and counting. The ones with a gold star next to them are the ones I'd press into your hands at a bookstore.
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 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 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 ...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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 introduced my Berenstain Bears review marathon with a story about grabbing "Go to the Doctor" off the bookshelf for my son, who was more than just a little afraid of shots. There is a good reason I chose that example. "The Berenstain B...
We had a trip to Disneyland planned last winter. It would be neither my nor my wife's first choice for a vacation as we collectively don't like crowds or getting price gouged. We are definitely not Disney Adults as they are called either...