Kids enjoy being read to, more so if the stories have interesting characters and the book is richly illustrated. Brenda’s Beaver Needs a Barber is a tale that is sure to get them excited, and you too, albeit for entirely different reasons. It does make for a good bedtime story as you watch your kids fall asleep. But it’d be hard to pull off reading it with a straight face without letting laughter slip out.

This is the Fifth installation in Season One of the Reach Around Books series. And like every other book in this series, it relies heavily on double entendres to mean different things to innocent kids and adults. The funniest part of this product is that it actually looks and feels like a legitimate kid’s book. However, it is anything but that.

A good narrative

One of the protagonists of this story is Brenda’s Beaver. Beavers being naturally wild creatures have lots of hair growing on them. So it follows that Brenda’s Beaver had hair all over it and people made fun of it. However, Brenda’s friends who had beavers of their own got Brenda to trim hers, so it looked neater. At least that’s the meaning unsuspecting kids will draw from this narrative.

Oops!

What if you read this to a young boy, and afterwards he asks you to get him a beaver for his birthday? Or he tells you that he’d like to give a beaver to his crush at school? You’d probably find yourself rolling on the floor and laughing your guts out. In the end, you’ll wind up saying beavers aren’t great as pets, but he could get one when he’s much older.

There’s a moral

Brenda’s Beaver Needs A Barber is a cute story in many regards. As is usually the case with kid’s books, it also leaves us with a moral. It teaches us that it is not good to have a shaggy beaver, else we’d get teased about it. We should try to clip it, snip it or wax it every now and then.

Great gag gift

The book is a great gag gift. Although the entire 22 pages are littered with underlying humour for adults, the message is effectively communicated without the use of inappropriate images. Therefore, it remains a great book for kids, albeit it’s not just for kids. So hand a copy to your unsuspecting loved ones, and perhaps dare them to read it aloud at a family gathering!