The cover of this book is annoying, and that is the point. My Parents Won’t Stop Talking! Is an illustrated book that channels the impatience, imagination, panicked exaggeration, and manic mood swings that kids can have like few books before it. When you read it you’ll remember when you were a kid and your parents would not stop talking. The family was out for a walk, they’d see somehow they know and talk for what seemed like hours. My Parents Won’t Stop Talking! is from the viewpoint of a possibly impatient child as that exact thing happens.
The family is headed out for a walk when the eight-year-old sees her parents start to head across the street to chat with the neighbors. As she sees her parents cross the street she goes through several instances where she’s had to be patient before. Her last name starts with a ‘Z’, so she’s always the last to be called. She’s waited at the dentist’s office and has seen her brother’s ballet recital for what seems like hundreds of times. As she’s trying to convince herself she’s a patient person who’s concerned about the way that other people communicate her imagination starts to get the better of her.
It’s here when the book really accelerates into a funny, trippy, surreal experience that crosses worlds and mixes the impossible. She just knows that her parents and neighbors are talking about boring stuff. Whereas when she has conversations with her friends they’re about fascinating topics. Her mind’s eye goes to one such conversation where she’s in a pizza car and she’s chatting with a friend who is riding a chocolate chip bicycle.
The chipmunks in the park could be trained by her so that they could become indoor pets. The world is ending and her little brother is too young to realize it and oblivious to the fact it’s too late. Everything around her becomes a prehistoric mess, with her eventually melding into primordial goo, from which she increases in size thousands of times so that she can squash anything in her path. All of this happens whilst she’s waiting to go to the park. When will her parents finally stop talking?
My Parents Won’t Stop Talking! feels like the literary sibling to Jim Benton’s Attack of the Stuff, a graphic novel that was absolutely fabulous. This is the illustrated book that channels that same feeling of inspired lunacy and offers a direct feed into the frustration, panic and the fleeting impermanence that they both have.
It also helps that the girl who is the main character doesn’t have a name. She’s just a girl, with a brother and two parents, in other words, she could be anybody. That’s key because everybody has had moments where they feel that something is going to take forever. It’s those never-ending times that you have to clean the room, write that essay or do that thing.
My Parents Won’t Stop Talking! is hilarious and will possibly be enjoyed more by the adults reading it, than the kids. However, leave the book alone with that same young audience and they’ll laugh themselves silly. They’ll get lost in the surreal illustrations. Next they’ll compare notes about the time that they did something that took forever, and internally realize that it really didn’t take that long.
The next to last illustration is a two-page spread without any words. It simply shows the girl who is still pretending to be somewhere else while her family is waiting on her to go to the park. It perfectly sums up how parents feel when they see their kids doing something, that only they know what they’re doing.
My Parents Won’t Stop Talking! is one of the picture books that will end up in your forever library. It’s silly, funny, big-picture entertainment that’s surreal and will be just as relevant today as it will be in 30 years. For now though, this is a go-to book for those aged three through eight, with those older audiences really enjoying the more abstract elements of it.
My Parents Won’t Stop Talking! is by Emma Hunsinger and Tillie Walden and available Roaring Book Press, an imprint of Mackids, Macmillan Publishers.
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