Welcome to today’s stop on the Mother-Talk blog book tour for my new favourite gift for boys!

The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn & Hal Iggulden is a package of excitement from the moment you take it out of the box (or pull it off the shelf, if you’re the old fashioned type). The bright red cover is thick & hard & reminiscent of something you’d find in Grandpa’s library. I couldn’t wait to open it.

The inside of the book, if you were to flip really quickly, looks like nothing special. No colour at all. However, as soon as you stop flipping and start reading, this book is totally awesome! Even for me – a girl! My husband liked it just as much and our son will now grow up doing lots of the crazy & fun activities in the book (if I ever let them get it long enough to actually accomplish anything.)

It contains detailed instructions on so many things that simply say “childhood.” Not boyhood, necessarily, unless you’re a froofy girl. I can think of tons of girls who would love this book. I know I would have. Maybe not the history of war, but almost all of the activities & games would have been right up my alley.

The book covers so many amazing things that I can hardly wait for my son to grow into. How to build a go-kart, build a treehouse, juggle, make a bow & arrow, make a paper airplane, hat, boat & water-bomb, how to marble paper, how to make disappearing ink, write in code…enough to fill many amazing summers that will be engraved forever in memories. There’s also great information on grammar, wars, extraordinary stories from history and, perhaps the most important – girls.

This is an awesome book. If there are boys on your gift list who don’t have it, buy it. I happen to think new dads are left out of the whole birth-gift scenario and this would be a fab book to present to a new father of a son. It’s like you’re saying Congratulations! Have fun helping your kid experience real life. He may break a few bones and he’ll definitely get bruises, but hey – we’re making men here!

Check out this very cool awesome promo for the book on You-Tube. And if you didn’t see Conn Iggulden on the Colbert Report, watch this.

Also, be sure to go enter the Harper Collins contest where they’re giving away 100 free copies!

Thanks to Harper Collins, we also have two copies to give away! To be entered in the random draw, email me via this link before Friday 5-18 at midnight.