my review of Sh*t My Dad Says

Sh*t My Dad Says by Justin Halpern

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


How Not To Write A Book



Assume Your Audience



My audience is white, black, Hispanic, likes popcorn, pizza, blue, orange, they'll find this funny, they won't find this funny, etc etc. Never assume your audience. This book's first mistake was making a joke of which I found in particularly bad taste. I will not mention said joke here, because it isn't important. The only thing I'll say is that I did not find it funny, and it turned me away.



Never assume anything about your audience. If you're going to make a joke in bad taste, never make it about a person. The worst thing you can do is offhandedly pick on someone, and then expect people to laugh.



Especially since I hold a sort of respect for said person.



Moving on,



Let's Give You Fifty Tonics and Hope You'll Like One



Many tv shows have decided to do this now. Let's throw a bunch of jokes at the audience and hope that they'll laugh at all of them.



I laughed three or four times throughout this book. The rest of the way, I cringed in disgust. That is not a good thing.



Many of these jokes were extremely vulgar, which I expected from the title, but I did not expect for there to be around 1000 of them condensed into a novel.



I'm not a prudish person ( <--- LIES) but I do think that there is a certain level you can take the shock factor without being in bad taste. The shock wore off after a few pages, and then it just turned annoying as hell.


The Hate/Hate Relationship



There is something called a hate/love relationship. I did not have this with any characters in this book. The father is annoying, crass, moronic, over the top and not very fit to be a parent. Any kid he raises is bound to be an asshole, which comes to my second point: The narrator is an asshole. It's easy to understand how he got that way (with a dad like that, who wouldn't?) but that doesn't stop it from being annoying as hell. I couldn't really identify or sympathize with him at all.



And Concluding,



Maybe I shouldn't have picked up this book to begin with. After all, I don't like vulgar books. I like my books to be clean. This was anything but. The f-bomb was dropped almost as if it was in place of "and" and "at". I won't even get started on that too much, though.



Whatever the case, I did not enjoy this book. And I wouldn't recommend it to others, either. Or read it over. Or read anything else by the author.



This should have stayed a blog. I did not enjoy this book.



I tried.



For laughs check out the joker who tried to troll this review over at goodreads