Wednesday, September 10, 2003

Love You Forever makes me puke.

My dislike of Robert Munch's children's book "Love you forever" is total. I wondered if it was intended to be some kind of dark comedy. In some ways, it is very funny, and I laughed the first time I read this story about the most dysfunctional mother-son relationship ever portrayed in children's literature. The last segment where the grown man sneaks into his mother's house to cradle his elderly mother in his arms is perverse and freaky. If one reads this book seriously, it is downright creepy. Has the author never heard of privacy? Perhaps there is something else going on. A few pages earlier, it is the psycho/stalker/mentally unstable mother who drives across town with a ladder strapped to the roof of her car. She climbs the ladder to sneak into her son's bedroom, crawls across the bedroom floor, and rocks him in her arms. I wonder what the man's wife had to say about that. Creepy is too kind a description of this bizarre book.

The scariest thing about the book is that it has sold 15,000,000 copies! What's wrong with you people?

If you don't believe me, believe my daughter. She will bring the book over and ask me to read it to her (I guess she is an eternally optimistic two-year-old). Part way through, she will beg me to stop. "I don't like that one," she says. In ten or fifteen tries, we rarely get past the first three or four pages, and I am relieved when she says she doesn't like it.

Oh, and the art sucks too.

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