Kids books that made you cringe

<p>Loved so many of the books mentioned here - Jamberry, Where the Sidewalk Ends, most Roald Dahl books - I can go on and on. I was a big Judy Blume fan as a kid and my D enjoyed her books as well. The only books I really disliked reading to my kids were those big Disney books - they just weren’t for me. Both of my kids loved the Berenstain Bears, so I was able to tolerate them. One interesting thing is that D pretty much hated all of my childhood favorites (except for those written by Judy Blume). I was so disappointed.</p>

<p>My kids range from 20 to 10.
We have many of the books mentioned here, some were favorites others not.
We had Mercer Mayer books ( little monster, I think ) We read 19 of them every night when my oldest was about three. She knew them verbatim and recited them . Her gandmother thought she was a genius and was reading already.
Little Bear books sort of spawned an imaginary friend for my youngest. She invented her own " Sister Hen " she was aound us for a few years and a source of many laughs in our household.
Junie B Jones books were a huge hit with the whole family. We thought those books were just so funny.
Dr Seuss’ The Lorax was a favorite as well as a few others.
There are some relatively new books out that I cannot stand.</p>

<p>They are " Walter the Farting Dog " books. Not only gross, but have a really negative message about the father getting rid of the kids dog, lying about it and then getting the dog back when there is a monetary award in it for him.
Hate those books.
Amelia Bedelia had to disappear from our bookshelves . Cute stories, but annoying to constantly read her name every other sentance.
Francis Books were well loved, as were " Little House on the Prairie ".</p>

<p>The Berenstain Bears.</p>

<p>They don’t wear bicycle helmets.</p>

<p>And they go into a stranger’s living room while trick or treating.</p>

<p>For a series that is supposed to be teaching kids things, these sorts of errors are appalling.</p>

<p>Anybody remember the “Goosebumps” series? My S (now 21) read tons of those in elementary sch. I never liked them. Thankfully he read a LOT of great books too. </p>

<p>I always liked the “Nate the Great” books when my boys were first starting to read. They were funny but not too cutesy for the guys.</p>

<p>Berenstain Bears were of an earlier, more trusting time in our history perhaps. We liked them. My S and I liked Richard Scarey. Robert Muench books in general were quite a lot of fun. My S loved Laura Ingalls Wilder, read The Long Winter every winter for years. Maybe I should read it myself, as we’re certainly having THE LONG WINTER around here. He and I also liked Gary Paulson books, with the creative self reliance in the woods format, though you’ve made me want to re read Hatchet for the socially conservative subtext. At one point I read Gary Paulson’s autobiography, and was THAT ever harrowing. Not for young eyes. </p>

<p>Goosebumps seemed silly. Stories from Wayside School, though kids liked them, also silly. Clifford books too simple, needed more words. Most Disney books were so insipid. One of my most embarrasing moments as a parent was having my son bring Disney books to his preschool for a gift. There was a tradition of bringing presents for the school back from a trip, and the grandparents facilitated buying Disney books, and somehow were there to give them as well. Not part of the ethic of that school.</p>

<p>For the life of me, I can’t remember anything much about the Berenstain Bears, certainly not what could have made them objectionable. They weren’t my favorites (or my kids’) in any event.</p>

<p>Of the books mentioned here, the ones I disliked most were probably the Little House books. I found them terribly written, and terribly racist, to boot, and just not very interesting. I had never read them as a child, so I was coming to them fresh as an adult. Also, I read the (IMO) far superior Caddie Woodlawn to them first, and also a more recent set of books based on pioneer narratives, The Bread Sister of Sinking Creek and Maggie Among the Seneca. By comparison, Wilder’s books were clunky and boring. (The Long Winter was by far the best of them, though.)</p>

<p>Speaking of outdated series, my daughter went through a Betsy, Tacy & Tib period. What a (boring) hoot those books were! I especially loved the one where the girls explore their religious differences . . . Episcopalian, Lutheran, and Catholic! And the American Girls books . . . blechh. (I was not completely anti-series, though. I enjoyed some of Babysitters’ Club and Goosebumps, and my kids really, really liked old Hardy Boys and some series called The A.I. Kids.)</p>

<p>I feel honestly ambivalent about The Wizard of Oz books. My daughter was crazy in love with them from about 2-1/2-6. I read all of the Baum-written ones to her at least three times, and her favorites – including the completely soporifacient Road To Oz, which is all about Ozma’s birthday party – as many as 6 or 7 times. Talk about awful writing! I cannot believe Baum edited a sentence in his life. But . . . there’s certainly a wild charm to them, and some of them – especially The Patchwork Girl of Oz – I might even be willing to read again.</p>

<p>Oh goodie, mathmom loved The Piggy in the Puddle too. You made my day.</p>

<p>(What can I say; I’ve got low expectations.)</p>

<p>He-Man (and his nemesis, Skeletor). Need I say more? The craze had passed by the time my son was born, but that just meant that there were plenty of used books around.</p>

<p>EK, good point about Ian Fleming–adore “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” (the book, not the movie), but then Fleming is a celebrity for being a writer for adults, so maybe that’s the big difference? Haven’t read the Terry Jones one, but he’s also someone I think of as being something of a writer. I’ll give that a try, and on your say-so look at the Jamie Lee Curtis one. Just not anything by Madonna!</p>

<p>Like LIMOMOF2, I enjoyed/loved many of the books listed here. Love You Forever, Giving Tree, Hatchet (though My Side of the Mountain really did this theme better). Our family is endlessly amused by flatulence humor, so right there is an entire category of books that I’m sure others would toss (Good Families Don’t, by Robert Munsch, hasn’t been mentioned yet :slight_smile: ). The strong feelings about the Little House series really surprised me, as I enjoyed them tremendously both as a kid and as an adult.</p>

<p>I don’t think The Little House books are racist. At least the last time I read them I was impressed with how while many character reflected views about Manifest Destiny and how white men deserved the land because they were farmers, Pa usually spoke up for the Native American point of view. Ma’s prejudices and fears were never presented as a good thing. I think they provide a very good window into 19th century thinking.</p>

<p>SlitheyTove: Yes, My Side of the Mountain was a fantastic read. I’ve read it about three times myself, and it’s a wonderful fantasy of self-sufficiency and independence from one’s family. Living off the land, and all that – as a 12-year-old.</p>

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<p>See, I came from the opposite perspective. As a kid, I hated it when books tried to shelter me from anything that wasn’t shiny happy bouncy rainbows. I loved many books that dealt with dark themes (especially Lois Lowery!), as they were often a good way to process whatever my own fears/angst were at the time.</p>

<p>There <em>were</em> some darker books that I had trouble with. Old Yeller was a good book, but it caused me for months to be convinced every time I went into a dark room that there was an animal with rabies waiting there for me. Not sure why dark rooms scared me more in this respect than, say, the woods.</p>

<p>I remember finding a dreadful little series called Sugar Creek Gang among some used books. The protagonists were all devout Christians, and the bad guys were all atheists, agnostics, and deists, and of course their lack of faith was the cause of their badness, and they were trying to corrupt all the innocent little kids. It put me in a bad mood for hours after I read one - I was used to anti-atheist bigotry by then, but that was a lot, at a high level, for such a little volume.</p>

<p>I liked both Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, but was disappointed that Nancy so often needed a guy to defend/rescue her, and her adventures seemed less interesting than the Hardy Boys - less physical adventure. I thought her friend George was great, though.</p>

<p>Wasn’t George’s sexual orientation suspect? ;)</p>

<p>Girls used to be “tomboys”–now they’re “suspect.”</p>

<p>Novelisto–agree with you on the Newberry prize books. Why do they all have to be so depressing?</p>

<p>And Lois Lowery is not a very good author. Why they chose one of her novels for our 9th graders I’ll never know. It’s just not good literature, and my sophisticated children knew it.</p>

<p>I’ll admit the Little House books are uneven. Some of them you can tell were assembled from her rough draft and not edited much before publication. My favorite is “The Long Winter” which gives me chills even today. Spending all day twisting straw to burn to keep from freezing!</p>

<p>I agree that there’s a place in novels for darker themes and images…all of the classic novels deal with ‘black moments’ of loss/unhappiness/fear and certainly fairy-tales are Grimm in more ways than one. But my feeling with many of the Newberry books and others YA fiction is that the authors pile on the dread and despair from beginning to end. In so many of them, it seems, the protagonist’s hopes are beaten out of them and they die miserably. This isn’t sheltering children from the dark side in favor of “shiny happy bouncy rainbows”…this is declaring that there are not and never can be rainbows, not even the kind you make yourself with a piece of broken glass. </p>

<p>Oh, YA is young adult and lately, IMO, they’ve been trending more toward ‘adult’ and less toward ‘young’.</p>

<p>Some of my daughter’s high school classmates put on a one-act play by Christopher Durang called “The Hardy Boys and the Mystery of Where Babies Come From”. Hilarious! (If you thought Nancy Drew’s friend George was “suspect”, you have to hear Durang’s Frank and Joe talking about their sweaters.)</p>

<p>Yeah, The Long Winter was amazing. And living with that couple who were going stir-crazy… And trying to manage a school room with kids that were bigger and older than you were…</p>

<p>Lois Lowrey in 9th grade? My kids read The Giver in 6th grade.</p>

<p>And, on the topic of “more A than Y” . . . did anyone else’s daughter go through a “Weetzie Bat” phase? I never actually read more than 20 pages of any of those, but the 20 pages I read had drugs, alchohol, and non-meaningful sex, all in high school. (And they were the first 20 pages!)</p>

<p>I never censored my kids’ reading, and I didn’t react to that. But I sure wondered who was buying them for the other 12-year-olds!</p>

<p>WashDad–Here’s another person who hated Good Night Moon. My kid threw a temper tantrum the first time I tried to read it. I thought it was insipid. Even as a toddler, she thought so too. </p>

<p>She loved a book called something like The Very Busy Family. I could never find it in a store; we must have borrowed it from the library 50 times. The mother is a stay at home mom. The little girl helps with housework. They live in a house with a dog and a cat. They had a washing machine. Mom in our family worked. We lived in an apartment. We have no pets. We had to go to a communal laundry room to do our laundry. The fact that she loved it so much used to really get to me at times! </p>

<p>I had a hard time with Katie No Pocket. It’s a cute story, but the grammar is abysmal!!! </p>

<p>My D LOATHED Nancy Drew. She liked The Hardy Boys and The Three Investigators. She just thought Nancy relied on Ned WAY too much and that she was a stuck up snob.</p>

<p>And if you want a racist book, try Pippi Longstocking! My D loved it: I felt really uncomfortable reading it.</p>

<p>Proving that tastes vary, we wore out our copy of Wilde’s*The Little Prince<a href=“I’m%20not%20sure%20that’s%20the%20title”>/I</a> when My D was about 3. We had to buy another. However, there is one sort of anti-Semitic sentence in it. It really isn’t…but refers to a Jewish ghetto–not a concept you want to explain to a 3 year old living in NYC!!! So, I left out that sentence, but then after a while, she realized that there were more words on the page than I was saying…</p>

<p>My office participates in “Everybody Wins,” a program that pairs adults with 3-5th graders, reading at lunch. My reader has chosen two Junie B Jones books in a row, and I really dislike those books - my kids never read them.<br>
The grammar is horrible - I guess this is supposed to be “cute?” Also, Junie is so out of control, and never seems to be punished or corrected, the parents just seem to whine or sigh about her behavior . . . </p>

<p>I liked the Velveteen Rabbit - my sister and I had scarlet fever when we were quite young, and the doctor actually came to the house to give us shots.</p>

<p>I loved reading the Wayside School books to my kids - they were so funny, it was hard to read them out loud.</p>