The LEGO Masters season 1 winners Henry Pinto and Cade Franklin wowed us with their incredible builds, down to Earth nature and positive outlook. When they announced that they were working on a LEGO related book I was super excited to see what they had come up with. Well that book is out and it combines their love of the brick with their experiences as dads to create The Thrilling Adventures of Brick Dad. Here’s what I thought of it…
The book is a collection of vignettes that show off situations that a LEGO dad might find themselves in. A lot of the scenes lean in to the stereotype of the goofy or not as competent dad but it’s always done in a very self-deprecating way. I think the concept handled differently could come across as mean but here it never feels like punching down, but more feels like somebody laughing about the time they did something stupid. Full credit to Henry and Cade for getting the tone right.
I think everybody who reads this is going to resonate with certain scenes more than others. There were some that I just quickly passed over but others that I laughed at because I recognised myself on the page. One particular example is the Dad Vision scene. This is something that I do all the time, much to the annoyance of my wife.
As a LEGO fan I enjoyed that LEGO is used here not just as a medium to tell the stories but the stories also embrace the LEGO-ness of it all. One great example is… spoilers… the dad to resorting to a brick separator to deal with weeds. It’s kind of got a LEGO Movie feel to the world.
It’s worth noting that this book is not a collection of MOCs and definitely not a book about LEGO building techniques. The builds are featured as the backdrop of the world. They are still good builds but they generally only exist as the stage. A bedroom that is only going to be shot from one angle as a background doesn’t need to be an insanely complex build. If you really pour over every page you might be able to pick up a few little tricks but don’t buy this book for that.
This is a pretty quick read. If you sit down with it and go from cover to cover you are probably going to be done in 30 minutes or less. I think of this more as a fun coffee table book. There’s no on-going story so somebody can just pick it up and flick to a page. My son loved grabbing this and opening up to a funny LEGO picture and getting me to explain it to him. He’s 5 so he didn’t get all of the jokes but I can see it being a fun family book for those of you with slightly older kids.
It’s no accident that this book was released in the lead-up to Father’s Day (September 5th for those of you who forgot), because that’s clearly the target demographic. I say dads and not just AFOL dads. AFOL dads are going to enjoy some of the LEGO humour throughout but your non-AFOL dads are going to laugh at the funny dad situations just as much.
I picked my copy of the book up from Amazon [affiliate link] but it’s also widely available at book stores across the country as well as major retailers. The cheapest price at the moment seems to be Big W. At the Big W price of $14 I think it’s a fun edition to your LEGO literary collection.
