The Couch Potato by Jory John

Hey, Story Seekers!

I have found the perfect chair.

It has snacks. Screens. Games. A remote. More screens.

And a mechanical arm that fetches things from the kitchen, so you never have to perform the exhausting maneuver known as standing up.

Readit?

"Move over."

No.

We're exploring The Couch Potato, written by Jory John and illustrated by Pete Oswald.

Readit has already decided this potato is a visionary.

"He understands comfort."

You're a worm.

"You have no idea how tiring wiggling is."

Fair.

Book Breakdown

Two things on this cover, and Pete Oswald put both of them there on purpose.

First: there's a window directly behind the couch, and the blinds are closed. Outside is right there, four feet away, and Potato has shut it out without thinking about it. That's the entire book, decided in one design choice, before you read a word.

Second, and this is my favorite thing in the whole production: Potato has a sprout growing out of his head.

That's what potatoes do when they sit too long in a dark place. They grow eyes. They sprout. They start to go.

Oswald has drawn the consequence of the behavior directly onto the character, and the joke is so quiet that most people will never notice it.

Inside, Couch Potato has it all figured out. Or believes he does.

Big comfy couch, everything within arm's reach. Screens for shows, screens for games, screens for talking to friends. Gadgets. Snacks. There's even an extendable gloved contraption for retrieving things from the kitchen.

Why would anybody leave?

Then the power goes out.

Everything stops. No screens, no gadgets, no electronic kingdom of potato contentment.

So Couch Potato does something radical.

He stands up. He takes his dog outside.

And the strange thing happens. He likes it.

The trees look good. The birds sound good. The sky is enormous. He watches a sunset without swiping, clicking, charging, downloading or updating anything.

The line that does the most work in the whole book is four words long: I noticed the stillness.

Then the electricity comes back, and here's the decision that makes the book worth owning.

He doesn't hurl the television out the window and go live in a tree.

He finds a balance. Sometimes screens. Sometimes outside. Sometimes friends. Sometimes the couch.

Oswald has a great time with the indoor world on the way there. The gadgets are absurd, the screens multiply, and there are potato-flavored television shows running in the background, including one called MadYam and another called Fries.

That's the kind of illustrating I like. The text says screens. Oswald asks how many potato jokes he can hide on the screens.

For teachers and librarians: Lexile 550L · ATOS 2.8 · 880 words · AR Quiz 509853 · 0.5 points. Harper, November 3, 2020. Forty pages, ages 4 to 8, PreK to grade 2.

Book four of the Food Group series, after The Bad Seed, The Good Egg and The Cool Bean. An instant New York Times bestseller and an Indie Next selection.

Jungle Jimmy's Journal

Here's what this book gets right, and it's the thing most books on this subject get wrong.

Couch Potato does not discover that screens are evil.

Good. Because they aren't.

He uses them to play, to watch things, to talk to his friends, to relax. Those are all fine. The problem isn't that he enjoys his couch.

The problem is that his world has quietly shrunk until the couch is all of it.

That's a far more useful conversation to have with a kid, and it's a more honest one, because grown-ups are ridiculous about this. We'll stare into a phone for forty minutes and then look over the top of it to announce that you kids are always on those things.

Bold position, Dad.

The other thing I admire is that nobody lectures him. There's no wise old carrot waiting under a tree to explain the importance of fresh air.

He walks. He looks around. He notices the stillness.

That's it. That's the whole mechanism, and it's the right one, because noticing is something a kid can actually do. Being told is not.

Now my honest criticism, and it's about pacing rather than message.

The outdoors section is the weakest stretch of the book, and it's weakest precisely because it's the part doing the teaching. The gags thin out. The pace slows. You can feel the book shift from entertaining you to making its point, and a kid who came for the ridiculous snack arm will feel that shift too.

It recovers. The ending is genuinely good and refuses the easy moral.

But this is a funny book with something on its mind, and for about four pages the something on its mind is driving.

For reading it aloud, the fun is mostly in the first half. Play Potato's contentment completely straight, like a man describing a system he has perfected. Then let the power cut land like a catastrophe, because to him it is one.

Readit's Review

I want the couch.

Of course you do.

"With the snack arm."

No.

"Why?"

Because I know exactly where this goes.

"I would still go outside."

Really.

"Yes."

I'm listening.

"I would put the couch outside."

That is not what the book means.

"Then I get nature AND snack arm."

I hate that this is a reasonable argument.

Also, did you notice the thing growing out of his head?

"The sprout?"

Yes.

"That's because he sat still too long."

That's exactly right.

"I'm never sitting down again."

You're on the couch now.

"Yes but I'm WORRIED about it."

What Others Think

Goodreads has it at 4.35 out of 5 from 8,177 ratings and 785 reviews, with 83 percent at four or five stars and only three percent at one or two. That's a well-liked book by any measure.

KidTime StoryTime's read-aloud is at 7.3 million views and 27,000 likes.

Calista names the balance precisely: "Jory doesn't want to cut out screens all together, but he does push for a balance between playing outside and screens." She also loves the wordplay, and adds a line that stopped me.

She wishes she could give this book to her niece and nephew, but they've aged out of picture books, and both of them, she says, spend so much time on screens that she wishes they'd go outside and be kids.

So the book about a potato who can't get off the couch is a book she can no longer get into the hands of the two children she'd most like to read it.

That's not a criticism of anything. It's just the actual shape of the problem, and it's worth knowing if you're standing in a bookshop wondering whether eight is too old.

Read it to them at four. Not at eleven.

Cassie Thomas picked out the same line I did, "I noticed the stillness," and wrote about reading it during a year when everybody was at home. Which is the other thing worth knowing about this book.

It was made well before 2020 and it arrived in November of that year, into a world where children had been kept indoors for months and screens were how school happened. La Coccinelle points that timing out, and she's right that it landed differently than anybody planned.

A book asking kids to go outside could not have been published at a stranger moment.

The criticism that exists, and it's a small minority, runs the other way from mine: some readers find the lesson louder than the story, and feel the book doesn't quite credit how much of kids' screen time is actually connection with friends.

I think that's a fair note, and it's partly answered inside the book, since one of Potato's screens is explicitly for talking to his friends. But if you're sensitive to a picture book with a point of view, this one has one.

Belly Laugh Scale

3 out of 5: Solid Chuckles

Three, and that isn't a knock on the book. It's what the scale measures.

There's plenty to smile at. The potato wordplay, the gloriously stupid gadgets, the fake television shows in the background, the sheer commitment of a vegetable who has engineered his life around never standing up.

And Oswald's sprout gag is worth the price on its own.

But laughs aren't the engine here. The book slows down deliberately in the second half because it wants you to feel the stillness along with Potato, and a scale that measures belly laughs has to say so.

Giving it a four because I admire it would be grading the wrong thing.

Three out of five. Solid Chuckles, and a genuinely good book underneath the number.

Final Explorer Verdict

Ages 4 to 8, and it's made for the household that's already having the screen conversation.

Which is every household.

What earns it a place is that the answer isn't screens bad, tree good. Couch Potato still likes his couch at the end. He's simply discovered there are other things he also likes, and that his world had gotten smaller without him noticing.

That's a much easier idea for a kid to accept than being told their favorite thing is bad, and it has the additional advantage of being true.

If your kid already knows The Bad Seed, The Good Egg or The Sour Grape, this is the same machine: John's wordplay on one side, Oswald's expressive food and buried visual jokes on the other.

And give it to the kid who likes hunting through pictures. Don't race past those screens. There's a second book's worth of jokes back there.

One practical note, and it's the one from Calista. This lands best young. By about eight, the kid you most want to read it will tell you they're too old for picture books, which is its own small argument for reading it to them at four.

The bridge to my own shelf is Little Jimmy Says, "Same Is Lame". Different subject, same nerve: both books are nudging a kid out of one comfortable groove. Potato discovers there's more than his favorite spot. Little Jimmy's whole argument is that everything gets better the moment you stop settling for the same.

Readit?

"Yeah?"

Want to go outside?

"Sure."

Really?

"Bring snacks."

Fine.

"And the couch."

No.

"Snack arm?"

Absolutely not.

"Tablet?"

Readit.

"I'm learning balance."

Nice try.

Keep exploring, Story Seekers!

Jungle Jimmy & Readit