Is this a children’s book or a police report?

One thing we did while Bea was pregnant was to read at least a book a day to Matthew. We’ll continue that now that Matthew is born, but one book we’ll be leaving out is the story of a somewhat psychotic mother.

Before I summarize the book, let me explain to you that “Love You Forever” by Robert Munsch is one of the best-selling children’s books of all-time, according to Publishers Weekly . It has sold about 15 million copies. So it’s very popular. Of course, so is Danielle Steele.

Now, some children’s authors are great. Chicago-born Shel Silverstein, who by the way is probably the creepiest-looking children’s book author of all time, is one of our favorites. It’s hard to read “The Giving Tree” without crying.

Some children’s authors are not so great. Probably most annoying of the bad children’s authors today is the celebrity syndrome. No, I don’t want to read children’s books by Madonna, Jamie Lee Curtis, or Maria Shriver. Larry King has a children’s book out, did you know that? It’s called “Daddy Day, Daughter Day.” It’s about how a child handles his parents getting divorced. Presumably, King relied heavily on his own court papers to write it.

“Love You Forever” is the type of children’s book that aims to be touching and instead is a little too touching. As in creepy.

The mother in the story seems OK at the beginning. She enjoys rocking her son to sleep, while singing the following lullaby: “I’ll love you forever, I’ll like you for always, As long as I’m living my baby you’ll be.” Aw, isn’t that cute?

So the boy grows into a toddler, and the mother still rocks and sings to him at night. Then he’s a wild teenager.

But still, late at night, when the teenager falls asleep, the mother sneaks into his room, rocks him and sings to him. A little too Oedipal for my tastes, but hey, we can let it slide.

Then comes the kicker: “That teenager grew,” the book says. “He grew and he grew and he grew. He grew until he was a grown-up man. He left home and got a house across town. But sometimes on dark nights the mother got into her car and drove across town.”

Whoa, hold on there. What? To cap the paragraph off, I swear to God, there is an accompanying illustration of a car driving at night with a ladder tied to the roof. A ladder! The only question I have is whether the mother tied it to the roof whenever she got an urge to visit her son in the middle of the night, or if she always just kept it tied to her roof just in case. Either way, it’s nuts. Let’s continue:

“If all the lights in her son’s house were out, she opened his bedroom window, crawled across the floor, and looked up over the side of his bed. If that great big man was really asleep she picked him up and rocked him back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.”

What that paragraph should have read was:

“If all the lights in her son’s house were out, she opened his bedroom window, crawled across the floor, and looked up over the side of his bed. But his son wasn’t there, because he had heard someone trying to break in through his bedroom window and had hid in the closet with a baseball bat. And because it was so dark out, he didn’t know it was his mother when he came out to confront who he thought was a burglar. And you can imagine what happened next. The End.”

The End.

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Mark Fontecchio

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