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.
I don't know where we initially found the how-to books. I know How to Catch a Dinosaur wasn't the first one we got. I believe it was How to Catch a Leprechaun. I'm actually going to look it up right now. It looks like How to Catch a Lepr...
I'm sure other people do this. You have a big collection of kids books, but every time you go to the shelf it feels like you've read all of them five, ten, a hundred times before, and you're just ready for something new. You can go to th...
So the cubs come home, and of course, as Mama predicted, they start bringing up all the stuff their friends have. Right as that happens, a big storm hits, which becomes the vessel for teaching the count-their-blessings lesson. Brother an...
The bus driver needs to brush his teeth and asks us for a favor: don't let the pigeon stay up late.
Both of my kids were definitely special interest kids. My daughter went through a phase where every book she read had to be about animals. My son had a phase where every book had to be about fire trucks, which has led to at least 10, may...
There are a lot of books on my children's shelves, ranging from tiny board books from when they were infants all the way to 20-plus book series for beginner learners. But if I were to count up all of the books and decide which classifica...
I've had this blog for a while now, and one thing I've never done is rate a book one star. It's hard for a book to get just one star. Think about all the different axes a book could be good on: the story, the illustrations, the purpose o...
Any kid who you've ever played a card or board game with hates losing.
It falls flat in one major area, at least in the bookish dad household, and that is on child engagement. That's not to say it isn't a good book in other ways. It's a book that I probably enjoy more than the kids.
Just like the title page, we are being misled that having pets will be troublesome.
Books like Goodnight Moon and The Very Hungry Caterpillar were the initial inspiration for getting so interested in children's books. What makes them special? What separates the really great ones from the ones that you don't want to read...
Goodnight Moon is such a classic that it's possibly the book that got me so interested in children's books in general. It's one of those books where you read it for the first time and it doesn't make a lot of sense.
So many delicious looking goodies. The toys maybe not so much, although I appreciate THREE squeaky cats that stick out their tongue.
This book almost feels as if it's written for the parents more than the kids. It's a very accurate book when it comes to the bedtime routine with kids, the constant struggle to get them through all the various steps you need to get them ...
In "The Berenstain Bears and the Bully" we're given a pretty extreme example of some childhood bullying and a few different solutions to it. I'm going to warn you now though, this book was clearly written in a different time with some "s...
We definitely get Papa Bear at his most mischievous here. It fits the Papa Bear theme in a way, although the idea of him going out and trying to scare the cubs in the middle of the night is maybe a little over the top. It's all in good f...
The plot is really straightforward. We have a very realistic scenario: Brother gets sick, misses school as a result of it, and then falls behind. That's something that all kids are going to experience at some point. They're going to miss...
We have this one in the collection probably because it had the word Easter on the front. When you're buying books for kids, you have your Halloween books and your Christmas books and your Valentine's books, and now we have this Easter bo...
Let's talk about the actual subject of today's book review: "The Berenstain Bears and Too Much Teasing". I'm sure you've realized that lately this book has been getting pulled out a lot. To me, it's one of the most interesting Berenstain...
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.