For all those families who found The Rabbit Who Wants to Fall Asleep helped smooth over difficult bedtimes, a new picture book satirising the ambitions of “helicopter” parents for their brilliant offspring is due out next spring: The Rabbit Who Wants to Go to Harvard.
The parody promises to “stop all that incessant sleeping” inspired by Carl-Johan Forssén Ehrlin’s self-published picture book, with characters Adderall Aardvark, Kollege Koach Kitty, and Admission Officer Owl helping Ronald and his mother rabbit “get into Harvard, now”. “This lovingly panic-inducing and innovative story helps children at any age to set aside sleep and other quaint relics of youth for a much worthier goal: the Ivy League,” said publisher Dial Books, which has a print run of 100,000 copies lined up for publication next February.
The images and title mimic the look of Ehrlin’s book, which follows Roger the Rabbit’s quest for sleep, and which is pitched as “a normal bedtime story with improved language pattern that will help your child to relax and fall asleep”. It hit the bestseller lists in the UK and US earlier this year before landing a deal with major publisher Penguin Random House.
The Rabbit Who Went to Harvard will be published by Penguin’s Dial Books for Young Readers, part of the same overall publishing group. Publisher Lauri Hornik described it as “Go the Fuck to Sleep meets How to Raise an Adult – tremendously witty and timely, and just plain fun” to Publishers Weekly.
Author Diana Holquist added: “I wish that I had had The Rabbit Who Wants to Fall Asleep when I had toddlers, but since I’ve got teens, I wondered what else Rabbit’s powerful, psychological techniques could achieve. Could they, for instance, help get my kids into Harvard?”
In 2011, Adam Mansbach’s picture book Go the Fuck to Sleep hit the top of Amazon’s bestseller charts after a pirated PDF of the book went viral. “The eagles who soar through the sky are at rest/ And the creatures who crawl, run and creep./ I know you’re not thirsty. That’s bullshit. Stop lying./ Lie the fuck down, my darling, and sleep,” is one of its soothing verses.
