Controversy in the Crib: A Children's Book Review

We will review anything at the Suburban Father Alliance. And while we are no strangers to book reviews (more like acquaintances who shack up once a year) we’ve never reviewed a children’s book on the site. The main reasons for this lack of content is because we get tired of reading the same sunshine & roses kiddie books over and over and over to our children. By the time the kids have moved on to something else, the only thing we want to do with the book is set it on fire.

Enter the recently published, highly-anticipated, even higherly criticized “Go the F**K to Sleep.” However since this is the outhouse  outpost for fatherly content on the entire surface of the internet, we felt it was our duty to effectively pass judgment on this literary work (also my mother-in-law works at Barnes & Noble so I get a good discount).

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="389" caption="All this fuss over a little book"][/caption]

Disclaimer: Before you get all up in arms about me classifying this as a Children’s Book, I will admit & warn that the book is about 65% adult humor and 35% kid stuff and pictures. So if your kid can read, you will have to explain what a bunch of 4-letter words mean.

Also, I will go about reviewing this on 2 fronts: 1) a Dad and 2) a Dude.

Dad Review
The premise of the book is really simple and almost brilliant: Pick a topic that will resonate with parents (“sleep” in this case), pick a word that rhymes with a bunch of other words (also “sleep”), use a bunch of profanity, pass it off as a children’s book, create controversy, and reap the benefits. Simple formula. The book is really no more than a bunch of words kind of jumbled together, no flow, and a lot of bad language. Of course my kids (none of which can read) saw the book and wanted me to read it to them so I was able to substitute some of the off color words with others and read it to them. However, they got bored with it because the underlying message is just “go to sleep.” Nothing to really keep them intrigued. Also the pictures are borderline disturbing. They depict kids sleeping with lions and one kid has a parachute coming off of his/her head and is descending into a farmer’s field. Trippy and strange. The one plus is that this book does seem to grab some inner dialogue that we experience as parents when we are frustrated and tired when our kids don’t want to go to bed. So as a Dad, I am giving this book a Pulled Pork on the Sandwich Scale. Wait till it gets released to DVD or whatever the equivalent is in the book world and just spend your money on some books your kids are actually interested in.

Dude Review
This book is hilarious. This guy uses the F word and everything in a book that looks like it was meant for children. Man I wish I would have thought of that. This guy is a genius. I give this a Amighetti's Special.

Summary
So that’s it. It’s a book with cuss words and it is just over average on the humor scale. Once you’ve read it once, you’ve read it 100 times. I will say that once my wife has the new baby, I reserve the right to review this as a sleep-deprived Dad.