Fortunately, the Milk . . .: Neil Gaiman

Product Information

Thinking fast, the father reaches through a small space-time portal that Professor Steg makes and borrows the milk from himself 15 minutes earlier.

With his wife away at a conference, the father in Fortunately, the Milk doesn't do the best job of housekeeping, but he does keep his promise to fetch milk for his children's breakfast cereal.Note, the humour I think will work for all ages, though, rather like The Simpsons, it will hit on different levels for different ages. He noted that he had two books--Fortunately, the Milk and The Ocean at the End of the Lane --being published within two months of each other: one, a children's book with an adult narrator; the other an adult book from a seven-year-old's perspective. Here's wishing all kids bowls full of Toastios, and a dad who's willing to bend the truth in the name of entertainment. And so, we're treated to a magical little tale of professorial dinosaurs, pirates, piranhas, and ponies.

Two kids, with dashed hopes and dry cereal, stare into the fridge where the milk is supposed to live.

Young draws an arrow from the milk's mention in the text to the bottle, sketched in the lower right-hand corner of the page. And I also think that there is something special and magic, sometimes, about those people who you somehow know you are related to by blood; Robert Frost's definition of home as the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in, comes to mind.

Even when he puts random ideas in a bucket and pulls them out one at a time, he can seamlessly craft an entertaining and memorable story. And after that, he gets trapped in a space-time continuum by aliens who wants to re-model the planet Earth and wants permission from him to do so as he is a representative of planet Earth. Over the summer months we have been sharing some of our favourite activities to go alongside our Story Explorer book selection. There’s aliens, pirates, dinosaurs, time travel, ponies and purple dancing dwarfs with flowerpots on their heads - what more could you want!Though didn't get to see the illustrations, we got to hear Neil himself reading it, and he's a very, very good narrator. My favorite part was when it is revealed that Dad, in a sneaky Keyser Söze-like move, has gleaned all his inspiration from items in the kitchen. I grew up with a father who tended to invent things and know things and talk about things and could absolutely have gone off into the kind of flight of fancy in Fortunately, the Milk.