Member Reviews
This book is really funny and had me laughing out loud as I can remember my parents telling me quite a number of these things! Especially "Sticking you finger up your nose" and "Crossing your eyes". The illustrations are done very well too!
I was sure this book was going to be among my favourites.
It makes me sad to say that it isn't my cup of tea.
Don't get me wrong, the illustrations were unbelievably beautiful and I loved some of the lies included in this piece even though I've never heard most of them and some are too creepy to tell your child. The thing is that I didn't find it great, maybe I was like Tommy Nilsson and had too many expectations?
This is a darkly humorous book with really wonderful illustrations from Brett E. Wagner and Animal Media Group. The illustrations are beautiful. The 'lies' are not really commonly told lies so much as weird 'what ifs'. I wasn't familiar with most of them, though a few (if you pick your nose, your finger will get stuck, if you cross your eyes, they'll get stuck that way, etc) I had heard in my misspent youth. Many of them were straight up odd and seemed a bit like the author was trying to think of anything to pad out the book somewhat.
That being said, it's a short (105p.) book with gorgeous illustrations by a very talented author.
If you think of it in the same vein as Go the F**k to Sleep or Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book then it's quite a bit funnier. I enjoyed it.
PS If my mom told me dragons came from stinky shoes, I guarantee I'd never have changed my socks or shoes again, just on the off chance of getting my own dragon :)
Okay, NOT what I thought I was getting at all. Disappointed? Maybe more like surprised! I've never heard of most of those "lies" listed, except perhaps for "If you cross your eyes, they'll get stuck that way." Some were so-so, and then there are those I'd consider horror--i.e., "Most rabbits have not developed the taste for flesh...Most." Huh? The accompanying illustration is awful. No, these aren't lies you'd tell your children, whether or not you are in the U.S., and I'm not sure where they came from. Really, I suspect these were aimed solely at adults, who'd be the only ones who could understand the illustration for "Seals love clubbing." The illustrations, for the most part, are extremely colorful and very eye-catching. A number of the color combinations startling, almost beautiful. Because it is literally a short picture book, my concern might be that the book is thought to be for children. It's not. It's a very dark sense of humor on display here--perhaps if it came with a warning? I was offered this download by the publisher and NetGalley and appreciated the read and review.
This is for those parents with a very dark sense of humour. The lies in the book are mostly new to me, and I would consider them to be lies that I wish I could tell my kids. The illustrations are beautiful.
While only two of the "lies" were ones that were actually told to me while growing up, the remaining "lies" were quite clever and a couple made me laugh out loud, like the one about screech owls stealing babies and selling them to storks. The illustrations are also very good and were perfect for the text.
I thought I was going to love this book. I love the title and was hoping it would be something to share with my grandson, or a twisted an adult book along the lines of "The True Story of the Three Little Pigs". It was a fail on both. There were a cpuole of believable lies, but most didn't make sense or were beyond disturbing. I gave it 3 stars instead of 2 because the art work was impressive.
With some tweaking, and using actual lies we tell our kids....this could be a really cute book.
I'm not too sure what I think about this book. It has a good premise but I can't actually see parents telling their kids 90% of these things. The editing choices were great and I liked the pictures, it's just, as an adult, I don't really believe what is in the book is really told to kids and it doesn't seem to be a book for kids. However, I think this would be a brilliant book for trickster parents to read to get ideas to mess with their kids' heads. If your into that sort of thing.
I feel like the book would have been better named LIES WE WISH OUR PARENTS THOUGHT OF WHEN WE WERE KIDS. Some of the standards are in there ("Thunder is angels bowling") with an up-to-date twist ("lightning is when they take selfies"), but there were also some hysterical ones I'd certainly never heard before. I asked my husband if he thought if he'd heard "Bubblegum you swallow would make you fart bubbles" he'd have swallowed any piece he could get his hands on. The answer was an automatic "Of course".
In line with books like GO THE F*CK TO SLEEP, this book is intended to amuse adults and it truly does just that. Thinking it needs to be added to the "Books for new parents" list we keep to give as gifts.
The concept of this book is quite interesting and I liked the idea. A couple of the little white lies were ones that I had heard before but then they got sort of ridiculous. These are not lies that I would ever think of telling a child and I hope no one else would. This I hoped would be a fun little book that made me think of the things I heard when I was a child. It just disappointed me. The illustrations were very good. I was looking for a good little laugh but it just was not funny at all.
<i>Lies We Tell Our Kids</i> is a book with a lie written on one page and an illustration of it on the other. The art in this book was a very good selling point. Many of the pictures themselves were what made me laugh because they were just so ridiculous and did well in showing how ridiculous and stupid these lies sound to us now. I also really enjoyed the illustration style, which for some reason reminded of the movie Tangled, which I think is a testament to how realistically they were drawn. The problem was I had never heard of most lies, the exceptions being the ones about your body getting stuck in certain ways, so the laughs were more so for the ridiculous situations and the lies were just there as captions for me. It probably didn't help that I was reading these on an ereader, so I couldn't see the colour of any of the pictures, therefore the ones about colours, like turning teal if you swallow mouthwash, didn't really affect me in anyway. All in all, this is a fun book to flip through and cut stuff out of to paste on your walls, but I don't find it particularly relatable.
Thoroughly enjoyed this book and would highly recommend to others!
Amusing in small doses. Cute illustrations. Some of the "lies" are a bit far fetched.
Art is fantastic and descriptive titles are inventive. Based on description, I was expecting humorous stories or examples when the sayings were used. In any case, my favorite is, "FDR once said, "We have nothing to fear but bears by themselves.""
I expected this book to be funny but I didn't find anything funny in it. Maybe it is marketed more for the USA market as I had only heard one of the lies.
I thought some of the ”lies” were cute but the pictures were gruesome and kind of disturbing.
These lies are soooo tongue in cheek. Loved reading it. Recommended if you like reading morbid things.
A fun little read, illustrating all those little lies we heard as kids, and the ones we tell our kids today. Seeing them illustrated, you realize just how silly they all are. I'd recommend this one for the whole family - a good laugh.
This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
Do not under any circumstances let this book fall into your children's hands! It's a highly whimsical and hilarious illustrated guide to the lies we tell our children to make them do things they otherwise might be lax or loathe in doing if we didn't scare the little pests into it!
If any children found this, the game would be up, and beleaguered parents everywhere would be disarmed! We cannot let this happen.
Some might even question the wisdom of committing these treasured secrets to paper in the first place, especially since there are relatively few of them, but there's a ready answer to that and it's not that trees are evil, although this is what we tell our kids to explain why we have a bark-load of paperbacks and hardbacks sitting in our personal library. I will think of the reason before this review is finished, I promise you!
So, if you ever wondered what the personification of the poetical "Mittens are made out of recycled kittens" or the creepy "The toothpaste ghost haunts your plaque" mottoes look like, then this is your go-to book. It covers all the common ones and many you may never have heard of. Indeed, some might question if some of these are really parental lies at all, but if they are not, then they should be, and anyone who disagrees will undoubtedly lose their car keys in the morning. Not that cars really have keys anymore in this electronic day and age, because the babies have swallowed all the keys! Yes!
I promised you a reason why this book had to be committed to paper. You'll kick yourselves when you read this, and probably pull a ligament doing so, because you know I'm right, and the reason is not the one you were thinking of: that your kids inevitably write on any blank paper they find, so the author had to cover the sheet with printing ink otherwise the kids would have vandalized perfectly good and pristine sheets. You know what I'm talking about!
No, the real reason - and this is backed by extensive scientific research - is that children cause Alzheimer's. You know it's true. You've been thinking this selfsame thing yourself - or you were, before you lost track of the thought. As soon as kids come around pestering you for something, you completely forget what you were doing. This is why we need these lies written down, and why we need to have this book handy, so we can speedily dispatch the kids out of our hair (for those of you who still have hair), and get back to what's most important in family life: making more kids!
So, I recommend this book for a fun read, and some pretty decent art into the barking.
The illustrations in this book are what makes it so great! They add to the humorous tone and explain some of the sayings. I would definitely recommend this book to some of the art classes to show students how drawings can convey meaning and humor while appealing to adults and children, no small feat. Many of the sayings I did not hear of or heard different versions, but I do believe that children around 9 - 13 will think this is hilarious. It is a quick read and can add a bright spot to your day.