Excuse me, I have a question

Last Sunday I was pushing a pram around the Melbourne CBD with my first hangover in years waiting until it was time to go to the airport to fly home.

After many retail adventures where unnecessary and expensive things were bought to make a three-year-old stop yelling quite so loudly when Mummy's head was hurting, I sought refuge in a secondhand bookshop and my daughter fell asleep.

During this lull I foundJustin Evans's A Good and Happy Child for $1.

I must admit to buying it in jest to see if it would work as parenting aid. To be fair it was reasonably effective for the rest of the day to say "Look baby, it says here you've got to be good and happy."

But the other day I looked inside and realised it was really good and certainly did not deserve to be sold for so little. Evil book retailing industry that causes such disconnect between price and quality!

In the book, a man goes to see a therapist because he says he can't bear to touch his newborn child. He mentions it wasn't his first time in therapy but he doesn't like to say what happened before. The therapist tells him to write everything down and the book purports to be him recording both his present day consultations and his recollections of the imaginary friend he had in childhood who made him do bad things. The way it's told, many things could be either supernatural manifestations or psychiatric problems. It is extremely spooky. Two nights in a row I put it down because I preferred to read it in the nice safe daylight.

The trouble is that I have questions. Many questions. Things are left out or not clarified. The present day timeline is bery disjointed. The unreliable narrating means it's really hard to know what really happened. Why does the book stop there exactly? Is that a good thing or bad? What happened next? Is any of it real? What happened to his mother? What? What? What?

In the past I would have just wondered. It was always far too hard to write fan letters care of publishers and would have seem impertinent to accost someone at a book signing or something.

But now writers all have websites. It's just so easy to ask them anything.

Anything at all.

I guess my question now is do I really want to know?

My kind of kids' book

I've been reading a lot of kids' books lately.

It's fair to say my three-year-old and I have different approaches to this.

I like to read a book once then move on. She prefers the same one to be read to her ooh say 50 times in a two week period and THEN she'll move on.

She doesn't care much about character development or logical plots or animals behaving appropriately (I mean lions and tigers regularly inhabit the same environment in kids' books! sheesh!!) but if it rhymes or if the picture are good or include bottom jokes, she's stoked.

We did agree about one we borrowed rececently called Abigail goes to the Beach by Felix Pirani first published in 1988.

I don't know if kids' books were different back then and I doubt they were because I think that's when Enid Blyton started to be bowdlerised but it certainly reflects a different approach to what I usually find in library books.

It starts off like a Pamela Allen meditation on the joys of parenthood where a man and a little girl called Abigail go to the beach carrying lots and lots of stuff.

Then the dad sits down and reads a book to HIMSELF while Abigail builds the biggest sandcastle in the world.

Occasionally she asks him how his book is going.

Occasionally he gives her an empty beer can to add to her sandcastle.

Occasionally she threatens people trying to knock her sandcastle down with her father's violence.

They have an excellent time doing their own thing next to each other and agree to come back tomorrow

but there's alcohol and shouting and absolutely no moralising.

Brilliant!