It’s a Girl

In the past week or so, Delphine has finally — finally! — started to look at books when we read them to her. Sure, OK, she’s probably not getting much out of the exercise besides pretty pictures and the sound of our voices. But still, it’s nice to have a new activity to do with her.

Most of the children’s classics we grew up with are available these days in board-book format: Dr. Seuss, Eric Carle, Goodnight Moon. These books are classics in part because they’re satisfying for adults as well as kids. One hand-me-down board book, however, made me cringe: Nippy the Speedy Dinosaur, by Janet Allison Brown. There’s good reason why this book isn’t a classic.

Nippy begins promisingly, with a zippy green girl dinosaur (complete with punk pink hair, of all things) exulting in her ability to fly through the air. A plump red T-Rex dinosaur named Chomper admires her skill and tells her so. Here’s the text from the last two pages of the book:

Chomper asked Nippy to teach him how to fly. But Nippy couldn’t imagine big Chomper floating in the air.

“I think everyone will be a lot safer if you stay on the ground,” she laughed. “Stick to chomping, it’s what you do best!”

I scraped the edges of the book, thinking that there must be more pages to the story — Chomper demonstrating that he can indeed fly, or Chomper discovering that he has other worthy skills besides flying. (Isn’t this the lesson of the hit movie “Kung Fu Panda,” after all?) But no, that was the end of the story — a bitchy acrobat with blue eyeshadow and mascara humiliating the poor lumbering fatso.

I should’ve taken warning from the book’s early pages, which show Chomper chomping on an anachronistic pie. Because, of course, all fat creatures are fat simply because they lack the willpower to stop eating too much, right? Hardly. (And all dinosaurs lived in a desert environment, according to Brown.)

“Baby, I think this book is going into the Goodwill bag,” I told Delphine.

Caleb took a look and said, “Why Goodwill? I don’t think anyone should be allowed to read this book.”

So here we have a journalist (me) already editing her three-month-old’s book collection, and a librarian (Caleb) advocating book burning.

Yikes!