La Comida/Food Book

Parents across the country love Pinkalicious, the first in a series of books by the Kann sisters. On the surface it's a fun-filled exploration of bad behavior and the consequences one must endure for dishonesty. But there's a much darker undercurrent at work here, or maybe I should say "lighter" since it is generally draped in white robes and encompassed by burning crosses.

Premise:

Pinkalicious, Middle America's favorite beady-eyed bitch, is a deceitful, thieving shit. That in itself would be forgivable. But it's one thing to steal a dozen pink cupcakes from your family and eat them. It's quite another thing to steal a dozen pink cupcakes from your family and eat them when your parents are so poor that your mother wears a fucking apron rendered from newspaper and old love letters, and the only outfit your parents can afford for you is a cheap ballerina outfit from Walmart.

All that aside, I'm still confused as to what the message of this book is. What exactly are the authors trying to say? Our protagonist eats a few cupcakes and she's not white anymore. To make matters worse, in the warped world the Kann sisters create, turning any color other than white entails being victimized by an aerial unit of the KKK composed of racist birds and insects that attack the shit out of Pinkalicious, all for the simple fact that she isn't white anymore. Hell of a message there, assholes.

As if that message isn't bad enough, the more sweets Pinkalicious eats, the darker her skin tone becomes, which in turn causes her life to get worse and worse. By the time this little shit turns red and her parents take her to the doctor's to see if she can be turned white again, you can't even question the racist undertones.

The doctor has a solution. At this point, you're expecting the cure to entail spending time in a cryogenic tank for a Pepsi commercial or wearing a diamond glove, grabbing your crotch, and screaming "shamoah," but all Pinkalicious has to do to turn white again is eat vegetables. You know, because only whitey sustains a vegetarian diet while exoticizing Eastern culture by drinking green tea.

Final Assessment:

Some jackass took a few scraps of newspaper, a three-color palette, a glue stick, and a spoonful of racism to create one of America's top-selling bowel movements. Pick this up immediately... if you like your kid's mind to be filled with the intellectual equivalent of chicken-fried dog shit. I give this book three out of four heaping piles of excrement.