Have you ever suffered from sleep deprivation at the hands of your children? In those long, dark helpless nights of torture, you feel like weeping, like pleading to your offspring for mercy. Or maybe just telling him to go the f**k to sleep. Well, Adam Mansbach knows the feeling and has written a bedtime book for parents who live in the real world, where bedtime stories and white noise don’t always send children to dreamland.
In Go the Fuck to Sleep Adam Mansbach captures the familiar–and unspoken–tribulations of putting your little one down for the night. With verses like “The flowers doze low in the meadows, and high on the mountains so steep. My life is a failure, I’m a shitty-ass parent. Stop fucking with me, please, and sleep,” and adorably dreamy illustrations by Ricardo Cortés, the book opens up a conversation about parenting, granting us permission to admit our frustrations, and laugh at their absurdity.
“I wanted to sort of do a riff on these classic children’s books that are all like very dreamy, and gauzy and loving and have little animals and stuff, and I wanted to contrast that with the interior monologue of the parent putting the kid to sleep,” said Mansbach.
The book has become a huge success, though. It was released in June with advance sales of over 100,00 copies and it’s already in its fifth print. Now, an audio narration by actor Samuel L. Jackson is bringing the rhymes to life, you can’t miss it:
http://youtu.be/5yqVnCAiWHw
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