About

I am no longer writing new articles on this site.

My name is Cassandra Gelvin and I have two young kids.

Everyone says you're supposed to read to your kids, but nobody tells you how mediocre most children's books are. I started searching the internet for books recommended by other parents as good, and then checking them out at my local library to see if they were worth buying, and stumbled upon The Pout-Pout Fish. I was so upset by the message presented by the book, I kept thinking about it for days and telling everyone I knew how bad it was. Finally, I decided that most book awards seem to be based on art and writing style and tend to ignore the message behind books, and somebody like me needed to step up and tell people just how bad some of these books actually are.

Most of the reviews on this site are short and to-the-point, summaries of the story, made to remind myself that I had read the book and what it was about, but I realized that some of these books are pretty old and somewhat rare and that there weren't very many reviews of any sort available for them, so I decided to make my reminder-reviews available to the public.

Every book on this site is rated as "bad", "good", or "meh". The vast majority of them are "meh", meaning I didn't really care for them but wouldn't mind if someone read them to my children. And sometimes the difference between "meh" and "good" depends on what kind of mood I was in when I read the book. To be rated as "bad", a book has to convey a message that I disagree wholeheartedly with. But I'm not judging anyone who likes the book or reads it to their kids, which is why the site is called "Don't read this to my kids". I'm judging the authors.

Part of my process includes weeding out books that aren't suitable for reading to children in one shot. These are all books that are 96 pages or shorter, and if they have too much text I'll mention it in my reviews. I'm not interested in what children are reading to themselves once they're old enough to choose the books they read.