Book review: Sh*t My Dad Says by Justin Halpern

Great tweets don’t necessarily make great books.

“Oh spare me, being stuck in your bedroom is not like prison. You don’t have to worry about being gang-raped in your bedroom.”

Dumped by his girlfriend and living back at his parents’ San Diego home, the 28-year-old author began posting his dad’s direct, unflappable outbursts on Twitter.

These foul-mouthed nuggets of wisdom on everything from predicting the dog’s toilet habits to the key to getting laid soon became an Internet phenomenon.

Then came a book deal and this collection of the retired Jewish doctor’s sayings wrapped up in a kind of childhood memoir.

But great tweets don’t necessarily make great books. The father’s forthright honesty has you barking with laughter, but packaging it around an uninteresting childhood doesn’t make it better and when dad isn’t on the page, things rapidly flag.

Thanks to Waterstone’s, Stevenage