Children’s Book Day (not safe for kids)

For Children’s Book Day I thought it would be fun to check out these “children’s” books aimed at adults. They’re humorous books with illustrations and wording similar to what’s in a children’s book but with very different content.

Go the F*ck to Sleep

Super short but so funny and relatable! The ebook is available on kindle unlimited but the best way to enjoy this book is with the audio narrated by Samuel L. Jackson. It is hilarious.

Synopsis: Go the Fuck to Sleep is a bedtime book for parents who live in the real world, where a few snoozing kitties and cutesy rhymes don’t always send a toddler sailing blissfully off to dreamland. Profane, affectionate, and radically honest, California Book Award-winning author Adam Mansbach’s verses perfectly capture the familiar — and unspoken — tribulations of putting your little angel down for the night. In the process, he opens up a conversation about parenting, granting us permission to admit our frustrations and laugh at their absurdities.

With illustrations by Ricardo Cortes, Go the Fuck to Sleep is beautiful, subversive and pants-wettingly funny, a book for parents new, old and expectant. You probably should not read it to your children.

All My Friends are Dead

My husband gave me this as a gift many years ago. It’s really cute and funny though I do feel a little bad for the dinosaur.

Synopsis: If you’re a dinosaur, all of your friends are dead. If you’re a pirate, all of your friends have scurvy. If you’re a tree, all of your friends are end tables. Each page of this laugh-out-loud illustrated humour book showcases the downside of being everything from a clown to a cassette tape to a zombie. Cute and dark all at once, this hilarious children’s book for adults teaches valuable lessons about life while exploring each cartoon character’s unique grievance and wide-eyed predicament. From the sock whose only friends have gone missing to the houseplant whose friends are being slowly killed by irresponsible plant owners (like you), All My Friends Are Dead presents a delightful primer for laughing at the inevitable. 

Ten Little Zombies

Very entertaining little book. Great gift for zombie fans and an even better gift for romcomzom fans.

Synopsis: When being chased by ten little zombies (no matter how cute they are), your only option is to systematically destroy them one by one, or else become zombie number eleven. In this love story wrapped in a tale of zombie mayhem, a resourceful couple flees from and picks off their undead pursuers with fast-paced ingenuity and an entertaining range of zombie-thwarting tools. As the zombies shuffle and stumble their way toward a variety of gruesome ends, our heroes must come up with new ways to escape sticky situations and stay together. This darkly funny illustrated tale think Bunny Suicides meets Edward Gorey meets Hallmark celebrates the romantic side of a zombie plague, with plenty of BRAINS and a lot of heart.

The Gashlycrumb Tinies

This odd little book is definitely the darkest on the list. It’s creepy and morbid but beloved by many.

Synopsis: The Gashlycrumb Tinies: or, After the Outing is an abecedarian book written by Edward Gorey that was first published in 1963. Gorey tells the tale of 26 children (each representing a letter of the alphabet) and their untimely deaths in rhyming dactylic couplets, accompanied by the author’s distinctive black and white illustrations. It is one of Edward Gorey’s best-known books and is the most notorious amongst his roughly half-dozen mock alphabets. It has been described as a “sarcastic rebellion against a view of childhood that is sunny, idyllic, and instructive”. The morbid humour of the book comes in part from the mundane ways in which children die, such as falling down the stairs or choking on a peach. Far from illustrating the dramatic and fantastical childhood nightmares, these scenarios instead poke fun at the banal paranoias that come as a part of parenting.

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The Book of Bunny Suicides

There are a few versions of this book available now but this is the original. These poor bunnies have had enough and find the most inventive ways to end their suffering. It’s hilarious in its cruel ridiculousness.

Synopsis: Rabbits. We’ll never quite know why, but sometimes they decide they’ve just had enough of this world- and that’s when they start getting inventive. The Book of Bunny Suicides follows over one hundred bunnies as they find ever more outlandish ways to do themselves in. From an encounter with the business end of Darth Vader’s lightsaber, to supergluing themselves to a diving submarine, to hanging around underneath a loose stalactite, these bunnies are serious about suicide.

Illustrated in a stark and simple style, The Book of Bunny Suicides is a collection of hilarious and outrageous cartoons that will appeal to anyone in touch with their evil side. 

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Have you read any of these? Know a few other books we should check out? Let us know below!

Synopsis and covers from goodreads.com