A while back, a person wrote a review of Rico Slade Will Fucking Kill You and complained about the book’s profanity. This inspired me to write a review about the book, Go the Fuck to Sleep. Here it is:
I stumbled across this book on Amazon and thought it looked cute, so I bought it to read for my four-year-old at bedtime. I was looking forward to receiving it, but when I opened up the package, I was horrified to see a sleeping child surrounded by tigers. Children should not sleep in the presence of tigers. Tigers are dangerous! Had I noticed the tigers on the cover from the start, I never would have purchased the book. I thought they were just really big cats from some magical land like Oz or The Magical Land of the Really Big Cats.
I should have thrown the book straight in the trash after seeing the cover, but I’m not exactly made of money so I taped a page from a newspaper to hide the cover from Max and read it to him later that night. I started reading it and it was really great, but then I got to the last sentence on the first page and was horrified! I’ve never read such filthy language in a children’s book. I wanted to stop reading. I NEEDED to stop reading. But Max is the pushiest four year old I’ve ever met so he wouldn’t let me stop reading.
I read more and more of the book and felt intense nausea, but I had to continued because Max would have would have squirmed away and told me that he hated me if I stopped reading before the end. The publisher of this book should be ashamed of themselves for publishing such filth. Not a page went by without one usage of the f-word. And there was even one page with the word for excrement!
Page after page. A few of them even had children playing with tigers like on the cover! I’m mortified that Max will leave the house and spend the night sleeping in the zoo surrounded by deadly predators rather than sleep in his room surrounded by his 27 teddy bears. And then there’s that page with the child falling through the air attached to a parachute. Oh my Lord! I don’t know what’s more dangerous: a child spending time with tigers or jumping out of a plane to go skydiving.
This horrible book is only 18 pages, but it felt like an eternity while I was reading it. I’m surprised I didn’t have a heart attack before I finished reading its last obscene sentence.
And then I saw the final page with the biographical data of the evil evil men who wrote and illustrated the book. I didn’t read it aloud to Max because it always angers him whenever I accidentally read a page like this. But I was shocked…absolutely shocked to learn that not only did the author have a filthy mouth and advocate putting small children in dangerous situations, but he is also an anti-Semite. Even worse than an anti-Semite. He is a proponent for the extinction of all Jews. I will never, ever read his book, The End of the Jews, especially to Max. At that moment, I felt like I had just read a children’s book written by Adolf Hitler.
Shame on you, Amazon! Shame on you for your false advertising. You are to blame for not listing the book’s actual title. How was I supposed to know what the book was actually called when you censored the title’s filthy word? I never thought anyone would use THAT word in a children’s book title. I thought it was a Sumerian word or something. I thought the book would be educational. Teach Max a few words from an ancient language before he went to sleep. But no–instead he’s been talking like a hummus and salsa factory worker ever since I made possibly the biggest mistake of my life.
——————————————————————————————————————–
I posted it on Amazon’s main site and their British site and the review received great comments (which is the main reason why I’m posting this blog entry). Check out the comments here -