Courtesy of Beaverdale Books

Review by Barb Palar

By Justin Halpern

It Books

05/15/2012

$16.99

180 pp

You may have seen Justin Halpern’s popular twitter feed and tumblr, “Shit My Dad Says.” His new book, “I Suck at Girls,” is in the same vein. Halpern knows what he has here, “Getting a book deal and a TV show based on less than five hundred total words is a level of luck reserved for people who survive plane crashes or find out they’re Oprah’s long-lost sister.” Halpern is being somewhat modest. There’s a bit more than luck at play in his work.

Each chapter in “I Suck at Girls” describes Halpern’s hapless experiences with girls and women — “I was six foot tall and a hundred and twenty pounds. When I danced, I looked like a praying mantis on fire” — accented with bone-dry observations from his father. (Most of his dad’s observations aren’t printable, even in this publication.)

But underneath the crotchety veneer and pervasive f-bombs are nuggets of wise fatherly advice. For example, when Halpern confides his fear of the movie “Arachnophobia” to his dad in the middle of the night, his dad explains, “Human beings fear the unknown. If something’s scaring you, don’t run from it. Find out everything you can about it. Then it ain’t the unknown anymore and it ain’t scary.”

At 16, Dad prepares to teach Justin to drive so he can go on his first date, “Around 3:30 that day, I walked in the door to find him home from work early, and in his ‘action’ sweatpants, which he usually only breaks out when he’s trying to kill an animal in the backyard or perform some feat of strength around the house.”

“I Suck at Girls” is a delightful Father’s Day read. CV