Idiot-proofing the baby library: My review of “Love Song for a Baby.”

LOVE SONG FOR A BABY

By Marion Dane Bauer. Illustrated by Dan Andreasen
28 pp. Simon and Schuster, 2002. (Board book; ages 6m+)

This book isn’t a even song. It’s a visceral depiction of all the gross shit that you don’t want to think about when you have a baby, couched in a syrupy little sing-song package that you can’t actually put a melody to because it fucking sucks.

I’ll begin with the fake song.

Imagine how stupid I felt singing this “song” to my adoring fan when, with every page, I get slapped in the face with a disjointed assemblage of syllables. Just because your pages all end with the words “and we loved you” doesn’t mean you’ve written a song, or a poem, or anything but crap.

Not that I’ve ever written songs, but I sing a lot of shitty pop music in my car, and I am as sure as Kanye’s opinion of himself that songs contain meter and rhythm. This book contains neither.

Case in point: There are no long lists of shit in songs, unless the entire song is a huge-ass list a la “We didn’t start the fire.” And Billy Joel wrote that, so he can do whatever the fuck he wants.

It isn’t even until page 18 that Bauer makes even a bleak attempt at rhyming with “true” and “you” followed by “tears” and “fears” and a big finish “high,” “dry,” and “why.” But by the end, we’re back to six pages of a jumble finale that makes no sense.

But this assault on the word “song” is mild in compared to the actual content of “Love Song.”

Reading this book aloud is almost more embarrassing than watching that steamy scene in 300 on an airplane in the middle seat with someone’s grandparents on either side of you watching it, too.

“When you came into our arms, slippery as salmon, puckered as prunes…”

Holy shit, she really just referred to my freshly birthed as a “fish” covered in vaginal secretions and amniotic fluid. Why not finish the line with “straight out of that stretched out love canal?”

She goes on to point out that the fish-child, we’ll call her Wanda, had no hair and no teeth and “Still, we loved you.”

This makes it seem like Wanda is some sort of fucking leper for having no teeth or hair, at birth. If she came out of my love canal with teeth, I would have freaked the fuck out. There’s no “still” about it. I probably wouldn’t have loved her if there had been teeth.

“Round cheeks, a round tummy, a round little bottom, all made us love you.”

True, I just mentioned that I may not have loved a Wanda born with teeth, but I didn’t also love her because of her roundness. And don’t mention the loving of a baby’s “round little bottom” in your book. It’s just not right.

“Even your burps were bells”

Really? Wanda’s burps were not bells. They were burps. Her farts were farts. Why do we have to bring the gastrointestinal tract into this story?

From Bauer:
           “We dried your tears and soothed your fears…”

It’s clear that she is plagiarizing at this point, or she’s got someone else ghostwriting pages 18 through 20. It’s so totally normal; it can’t be from the same demented mind.

By page 21, she’s back on form with the shit talk:

“We tossed you high, [sic] we kept you dry. Can you guess why? We loved you.”

I’m not sure how tossing and diaper changing are related. I believe we we change diapers because of the fact that it’s disgusting to let a baby sit in its shit, so it’s just the right thing to do.

Page 26 brings us to the most elaborate, non-Bauer line of text in the entire work:

“You burst upon our world like a comet, like birdsong in the silver silence of dawn”

I don’t even know what to say. From slime soaked salmon fish child with nursing-home orthodontics, to the silver silence of dawn? I am freaked the fuck out.


Don’t read this book.