A Different Kind of "Children's Book"

It's a short book that's just a few pages long. Each page contains a short stanza of , while the rest of the pages comprise of colorful illustrations showing images such as the night sky, the moon, birds, lions and beds--sounds like your typical children's bedtime storybook, right? If you don't pay attention to what the stanzas say, you'd easily mistake it for a children's book, but once you read it you'd realize that the book is laced with profanity throughout--even the title itself contains "bad" words.

Go the Fuck to Sleep is a book written by Adam Mansbach, which narrates a frustrated parent's difficulties in making his or her child go to sleep, told from the perspective of the poor, exhausted parent. The author was inspired to come up with this book because he himself had a difficult time making his two-year old daughter sleep. Frustrated and annoyed, he posted on Facebook, "Look out for my forthcoming children's book, Go the ---- to Sleep" which was well-received by his Facebook contacts. He began writing and the manuscript eventually found its way to the hands of publishers. Although scheduled for release next month, the book is already on the bestsellers list at Amazon.com and PDF copies of it have already been circulating online. It also has an audiobook version (courtesy of audible.com), narrated by American actor Samuel L. Jackson.

The book has become popular mainly because it basically says what every exhausted parent would have wanted to say but had not done so out of fear of becoming labeled as a "bad parent". The book is also a way for parents to have a laugh at themselves--although I am not a parent myself, my own parents' narration of their difficulties in putting me to sleep when I was a baby has made me realize how very demanding this "job is".

While actor Samuel L.Jackson's audio recording of this book is the best one out there (the tone of his voice captures the sentiments of the parents of young children out there), the most hilarious one would have to be that of the video posted below. In the video, an old Filipina woman was given a copy of the book  (by her daughter) for her to read to her granddaughter. She begins to read the book but eventually realizes how much profanity it contains. She would pause every few sentences and would say something like, "Oh no, this is a very bad book" but still goes on to read the book anyway, until the end! As of this blog post, the video has had 406,933 views on YouTube and still growing. Poor old woman! Oh, well, at least she made over 400,000 people laugh!