What to Read to Your Kids

I’m going out on a limb here and telling you that I cannot imagine a single person on your holiday list who would not love to receive Bob Shea and Lane Smith’s latest picture book, Kid Sheriff and the Terrible Toads (best for ages 4-10). Our family is so utterly and completely obsessed with it—and has been since June, when I brought home an advance copy from a conference—that, not only do we have the entire thing memorized, but we have taken to quoting it around the dinner table to crack ourselves up. Scout’s honor. Find me something more fun than reading this book aloud. You cannot.

Kid Sheriff, a collaboration by two of the funniest men in the biz, combines the over-the-top absurdity of a Western yarn with the deadpan seriousness of a child’s logic. The end result is pages of layered and spectacular off-beat humor. (Oh, to be a fly on the wall when Shea and Smith come up with this stuff!) It’s the ultimate boy-outsmarts-adults story.

Drywater Gulch had a toad problem.

Not the hop-down-your-
britches kind of toad.

Not the croaking-all-night
kind of toad.

The never-say-thank-you
outlaw kind of toad.

Why those Toad brothers
would steal your gold, kiss
your cattle, and insult your
chili. Hootin’, hollerin’, and
cussin’ all the while.

Then hope rode into town.
Slowly.
On a tortoise.

Give him a minute.

The new sheriff turns out to be a boy and, at first pass, the most unlikely solution to the town’s bandit problem. “Can you handle a shooting iron?” asks the Mayor. “Nope,” the boy responds. Nor, the interview reveals, can he “ride a horse,” “do rope tricks,” or “stay up past eight.” Instead, what qualifies this boy as a sheriff is, in his words, “I know a really lot about dinosaurs.”

What do dinosaurs have to do with putting criminals in jail? Just wait. It’s pure brilliance.

With complete confidence and without cracking a smile, our young sheriff navigates the evidence left in the wake of the Toads’ many crimes (a hole blasted through the wall of the bank, a tied up stagecoach driver, etc.) and concludes that this is actually the work of various dinosaur species. (“Velociraptors. Whole mess a them. Confused your stagecoach with a lumbering Protoceratops, I reckon. Honest mistake.” “Wow, you’re good,” said the Mayor.) Of course, we as readers are not so naive as the Mayor and his people. Neither, as it turns out, is the boy.

When our own children act out—wailing in the supermarket over a box of cereal, staging a protest on the sidewalk by refusing to walk another step—what do parenting experts tell us is the most effective form of discipline? Ignoring them. Because bad attention is still attention. Similarly, when the Toads discover that a child paleontologist is persuading the entire town that dinosaurs are the real culprits behind the hootin’ and hollerin’, they are suddenly more than happy to confess to the crimes. The Toads actually beg to be locked up in place of the alleged dinosaurs. (“‘What? That ain’t right. We done robbed those!” said the big mean Toad…I want what’s comin’ to me…OUTTA MY WAY!’”)

This is when I tell you, in full disclosure, that it wasn’t love at first sight for me with Kid Sheriff. Sure, I liked it immediately. But it has been over time that I have become really, really enthralled with it—and here’s why. This is a book that demands to be read aloud for full effect (if you like to do voices, and if you can do a good drawl, you’re in for a treat); but it takes several readings to get the timing and cadence just right. It also takes multiple readings for kids to digest the wildly exaggerated turns of phrases and to access the irony beneath the surface entertainment.

But isn’t this exactly what we look for in a picture book? In every book they create, Bob Shea and Lane Smith never talk down to the child reader. They are masters at showing without telling, at liberally drawing on complex vocabulary, and at making the child work for payoff. Even Smith’s unique angular, two-dimensional, sepia-toned art—at once silly and somber—is rich with subtle jokes and invites repeated study.

Ultimately, to fall in love with this book, I had to hear it through voices other than my own. I had to watch my children’s grandfather stop several times mid-read, because he was laughing so hard—and the kids immediately filling in the next line for him. I had to hear my four-year-old daughter re-enacting long stretches of the dialogue, while playing in the next room with her dolls. It gets under your skin, this book. Like that wine you’ve been waiting all year to drink, it gets better and better. Make room for this book in your Holiday Shopping. You won’t be sorry.

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Amazon.com affiliate links support my book-buying habit and contribute to my being able to share more great books with you–although I prefer that we all shop local when we can!

Tagged: Bob Shea, boy main character, dinosaurs, favorite illustrators, holiday gift guide 2012, holiday gift guide 2013, holiday gift guide 2014, humor, Lane Smith, picture book, police, silly, Western

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