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The Big Box of Sparkly Unicorn Magic
If Hobbes was a snarky unicorn and Calvin was an awesome little girl.
Back in 2015, when my daughter Poesy was seven, I read her a story every night at bedtime. It was a glorious time, not just for our father-daughter relationship, but for my own relationship with kids’ literature, which is a spectacular and rich part of the publishing world that grownups frequently have no contact with.
One of the great successes of our bedtime story ritual was our discovery of Dana Simpson’s “Phoebe and Her Unicorn” comics, whose only defect was that they were too funny, and we’d laugh so hard at bedtime that it was hard to get the kid to sleep. That’s a good problem to have! Here’s my review of that first book:
We almost didn’t read Phoebe and Her Unicorn; it sat on my daughter’s shelf for months, untouched, because it looked like something pink and princess-y, and that’s not really her thing. But the kid got it down and started reading it to herself — really reading it to herself, as in, we’d have to take it away from her when it was time to get ready for school. My wife glanced at it, and asked if I’d ever really looked at it: “It’s really funny!”
