So my son has a book I bought him called “I Stink!” and it’s about a NYC garbage truck that gathers trash at night while the rest of us sleep.
It’s basically a chronicle of a night in the life of this garbage truck, with an interlude to list out the letters of the alphabet in terms of nasty garbage items. “Apple cores”, Nasty neckties", “Gobs and gobs of gum”, etc… Long story short my son LOVES the book because he’s not quite 4, and loves trucks of all kinds, loves burping, pooping and farting humor as well as nasty stuff, and this book combines all of them. Which is cool- he’s a little boy; that’s what they like.
Anyway what brought me to the pit is that if you read the Amazon reviews, there are a surprising number of people who reviewed the book with one star because of 2 reasons. First, the trash truck says “Did I wake you? Too bad.” after he does some noisy aspect of trash collection in the middle of the night. Second, apparently a lot of the alphabetic garbage items could have been recycled or composted. By the anger in the reviews, you’d think this book was the Al Qaeda Children’s Primer for Martyrdom or something like that.
WTF? It’s a children’s book about an anthropomorphic garbage truck in NYC. He’s going to be a little bit rude. And it’s probably hard to find enough non-recyclable and non-compostable nasty garbage items to list out the entire alphabet with. If the truck was polite and recycled and all that, the book wouldn’t be as entertaining or as useful.
People (esp. ninny moms) need to get a grip; their precious kids aren’t going to be destroyed if they read a book with a slightly rude character, or one that doesn’t diligently recycle and compost. They just well might end up screwy if you keep them in a bubble where they’re only exposed to “good” stuff though.
I so want to support this OP. I’m sure there were lots of idiots overreacting (What!? On the internet!?) but I don’t see how criticizing rudeness and promoting recycling can be at all a bad thing.
Well, it wasn’t so much the idea of rudeness or recycling that got to me, it was the idea that these people were so offended by it that they were throwing the book away and bad-mouthing it.
The book’s not perfect, but come on. In the grand scheme of things, the book isn’t going to warp your child and make them rude and not recycle. But it could possibly be a big part of instilling a life-long love of reading or if nothing else, help teach your kid the alphabet.
I understand. I didn’t check the comments so I can’t really offer an opinion on that but I’m sure I’d find some knuckleheads worried about their parent of the year award.
Not warp, but if it is an educational book for very young children the criticism seems reasonable to me. I was just expecting something a lot more egregious than that by the title. Like the truck offering the other cheek to the garbage bin.
Even if the book was the embodiment of everything those people wanted to see, some of those same people would object to it’s existence as a book because it was still printed on paper. There is no pleasing some people. People that take the time to write negative reviews on children’s books are beyond pleasing, they just want to bitch.
When the revelation comes I will not offer them safe harbor, beyond that not much to be done about it.
When it comes to alphabet books, I always want to know what the “x” item was. A xylophone? An x-ray machine? (Which actually should be discarded in a special way.)
My daughter has an abc chart of animals. There’s lots of Aardvaark, Badger, Cougar type stuff. For the X, it has not any kind of animal, but the specific mythological horse Xanthos, all glowy-gold and shit. Because X-Ray Fish would be too weird?:smack:
Well I certainly hope those people don’t buy any books by Shel Silverstein or any of the Walter the farting dog books, it might give them the vapors, heheh.
One Christmas season the folks from my office went to a local elementary school to read to the kids (and donate the books). I had a classroom full of second graders absolutely *enthralled *by “Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout Would Not Take the Garbage Out.”
Can you imagine how boring the book would be if the anthropomorphic garbage truck talked about separating the garbage and nagged kids about composting?
Not that I’d bother writing a review but there have been relatively minor things along the way that have encouraged my child to emulate bad behaviors just because she was of an impressionable age and thought they were funny. For example, I absolutely loathe Peppa Pig, not least because she’s the reason my daughter jumps in every puddle (which is something she’d probably do anyway) but because she bullies her brother and is incredibly rude to her father and yet is the protagonist of the cartoon.
So if the book encouraged the child to go around saying things like “Did I wake you? Too bad.” without portraying this as bad behavior I’d be annoyed - not “throw the book away” annoyed but certainly “make a point to tell my child never to do this” annoyed. Kids will be rude enough without being encouraged to do so.
(On the flipside, we do NOT do Barney. I don’t care how positive the messages are; the purple dinosaur will never appear on our television if I have anything to say about it.)
To be fair, the “Did I wake you? Too bad.” part is in the context of the garbage truck doing his job, not gleefully going around waking people up. More of a recognition that overnight trash pickup can sometimes be a little noisy, than anything else- that’s how we explained it to our son. I suppose the writer could have followed up the “Too bad.” with “Picking up the trash is my job.”, but it’s fairly clear that was the point.
And… for the reviewers who think the writing is poor… they’re just idiots and probably borderline illiterate. It’s not a book with a classic story and narrative; it’s a freaking trash truck saying what he’s doing as he goes about his night of picking up trash. It’s like you’re riding along with him as he does his thing and he’s telling you while he does it. It is NOT a story with a clearly defined exposition, rising action, climax and denouement, or anything like that.
I think X is XL T-shirts , Y is “year old yams”, Z is “zipped up ziti with zucchini”. U is “ugly underpants”, etc… All with suitably gross looking illustrations.
The picture for that one - the upper half of Neville’s tiny little face peering out a huge gloomy window, with one bare tree branch - is priceless. I’d have it on the wall of my office, only the humour would be lost on some.