Still Life With Children: Tales of Family Life [Paperback]

Richard Scrimger (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Harpercollins Canada (May 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0006384862
• ISBN-13: 978-0006384861
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,309,182 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The funniest family-life book ever written. Really., December 16, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Still Life With Children: Tales of Family Life (Paperback)

I stumbled across this book while looking for one of Scrimger's children's titles and picked it up after the initial glance suggested this guy was really funny.

Well I wasn't disappointed. It is the first book in years that I have read that has me laughing out loud and chortling every few minutes. His description of life with four kids under the age of six is so accurate and heart felt that you just want to go over to his place and pay a visit (although the floor is sure to be sticky, the furniture toppled over and the noise level at high volume).

He covers a full year in the life of his brood, dissecting birthday parties, Hallowe'en, school concerts and less-than mundane visits to laundromats, jewelry stores and doctors' offices. Although I thought that I was happy that my own kids have graduated to their teens, I get slightly melancholy reading about this young family's everyday adventures. But it is so wonderfully written and entertainingly told, there isn't room for sadness.

There is also not a wasted word in the book. It is tightly written and even his stream-of-consciousness word play with his toddler is efficient and sharp. But most of all I love his observations about the nature of kids... his and the rest of ours.

"... Ed is a perfect conductor (of sticky and messy materials). Ever wonder how the honey or Magic Marker is conveyed to the rug and the furniture? I tell you, it's through the kids. Ed is amazing, he's like copper wire, he can reach for a jam-filled donut with his right hand and instantly discover jam on the tablecloth under his left hand. I myself have seen this."

Dave Barry would retire if he knew that Richard Scrimger was entering the field. This has got to be the funniest dad alive.

5.0 out of 5 stars A Family Favourite, November 13, 2005

By 

C. Heron (Toronto, Ontario) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Still Life With Children: Tales of Family Life (Paperback)

I re-bought this title after our family copy disapeared, most likely in a holiday hotel room.

I came from a family where mum and dad read to my brother and I respectively, every night. We plowed through hundreds of novels, but my mum used to occasionally read a chapter from this particular book of articles. I'm not sure why at 10 or so I found this so interesting - but it's definitely amusing on a different level eleven years later. The point is, these stories are just laugh out loud hilarious, and delightful to read aloud.

Now, I realize how dead clever this gentlemen's writing is - he's a bit verbose at times, but witty as anything. You just fall completely in love with him and his entire family, and simply kill yourself laughing - my fiancee and I read them together in the evenings with a glass of wine, and count ourselves lucky to have that crazy, wonderful stuff ahead of us.

One of my all-time favourites.