Review: Hot Guys and Baby Animals

Hot Guys and Baby Animals
by Audrey Khuner

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Hot Guys and Baby Animals / 978-1449407902

Alright, let's get this out of the way first: I'm not super-thrilled by the "pron 4 wimmen!1!" marketing for this book. This book isn't porn, and while it's fine to look at it and/or be turned on by the models, I don't think it's valuable to perpetuate the meme that women can't or don't look at real porn, when many of them do. That meme-road leads only to sex-negativity and shaming. (And, yes, I'm the Most Humorless Feminist in Nofunnington, to quote Melissa McEwan. I'll show myself out, etc.)

Now that we've got that out of the way, I like this book just fine for what it is. It has hot guys and adorable baby animals and -- and this is a BIG part of why I like it -- cute flavor text for each of the pictures. So you get things like:

MARK & SADIE BELLE
Mark thinks people like him because he has a great smile.
Sadie Belle thinks people like Mark because he has Sadie Belle.

See? It's cute! (Well, I think so.) And there's a lot of really sweet, upbeat friendliness to this book -- I almost feel like this is the sort of thing I would really value the next time I go through a bout of depression. In some ways it seems sort of tailor-made for therapy: lots of friendly nice people smiling at sweet fuzzy animals with humorous-yet-inviting flavor text that isn't an overwhelming wall of text. I like it, is what I am saying.

I also like that there's a diversity of skin colors among the 38 models, as well as a lot of welcome facial diversity. I'm less thrilled by the lack of body diversity, since there are no visibly disabled or fat models, but that's industry standard for these things, I suppose. Still, they could have added one stocky guy and one guy in a wheelchair and had 40; how hard would that have been? I'm just saying.

All in all, this is a cute coffee table book and I genuinely think could be helpful to anyone going through a depressive funk who also happens to like hot guys and baby animals. I'm sad to see, for that reason, that Amazon doesn't seem to carry a "hot girls and baby animals", because I imagine those could be similarly cheering to look at. Someone should get on that.

NOTE: This review is based on a free electronic Advance Review Copy of this book provided by the publisher.

~ Ana Mardoll

MARK & SADIE BELLE