This book is an absolute feast for the imagination. You follow Dad on his ludicrous tale as he explains to his children why he took so long fetching milk from the shop. It is brimming with joy and silliness. I returned to the bus-stop which which was covered, unfortunately the covering did not seem to be designed to keep the rain off, rather to concentrate the droplets and deposit them upon the head of a waiting passenger. I was soon joined by another hopeful passenger, an old lady who smelt of wet cardboard and boiled sweets. If you don't get it, please do some memory tests, since you have to get it, you just read it less than hour ago! Hullo,” I said to myself. “That’s not something you see every day. And then something odd happened.” Maybe what I wanted from this story was more development, maybe (like everything with Gaiman) I have this grand idea of what he "should" write, I can't appreciate what he actually writes.

Gaiman and Young are a wonderful team where the words of Neil make a perfect amalgam to the drawings of Scottie. Update: The fourth grade kids are now Grade 8 students (that is unbelievable enough - they must have opened that door that let in the time-space-continuum!), and they still refer to the time when I read "Fortunately the milk..." aloud to the class. I would say that is the best praise a children's book can get. "Then the milk touches the milk" has become an insider saying! Either the universe will end, or we will be watching the madness of dwarves with flower pots go on for a while still.If you can't being a kid again at least for an hour and laughing with a sweet story like this one, geez, please look for an empty grave and jump in there, you are already dead and nobody told you!

No matter how much other characters assist your heroes, ultimately, they must find their own way. This is true in Fortunately, the Milk, when the father must save himself, and it's also true for Bod in The Graveyard Book, for the heroine of Coraline, and for the boy hero of Ocean. Why is that important to you as an author? I listened to this on Scribd, with Gaiman doing the narration. It is worth it just to listen to him read it. However after listening to it I went and found the wonderful illustrations. Beth Tabler I don't know. I think part of it probably comes from when you are writing a first-person narrative, you don't necessarily think of people by names. I definitely can go through days, possibly go through weeks, without actually noticing that I'm Neil Gaiman. It's not something that I'm going to think about unless someone asks me my name or unless I have to write it. As far as I'm concerned, I'm me. And I loved the idea of a book in which names were enormously important and the act of naming was hugely important and names occur all through Ocean in all sorts of ways and shapes, and you'll find all of the children's stories, all of the important stories our hero runs into, have the names of women in their title, whether it's Alice in Wonderland or Iolanthe or the imaginary stories that I made up, the novels, the one about Sandy and stuff. But I love the idea that, especially when you're a kid, you can simply point, and you can say, "me," you can say, "my sister," and you can say, "my dad." The challenge in Fortunately, the Milk, was doing a narrative which had two different "me's" narrating. Both the father and the son get to tell the story, at the same time sometimes, and neither of them have names, other than their roles in the story.The story is Gaiman's attempt to write a book that casts fathers in a positive light. After writing The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish and finding that a lot of people were giving it to their fathers for Father's Day as a tongue-in-cheek insult, he thought he had better make amends. So... the father as the hero of the day, does it work? I think people find refuge everywhere, and I think that people make families as much as they are born into them. 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. And, of course, they do. In each of those cases you're looking at people who get to build families or get to be given safe places by families, and, yes, people do often get refuge in the most wonderful, strange and unlikely places. There was something very good about this book. It was an ‘enhanced edition’ which means that the writer reads the book out loud to you while you read it! This writer is a good reader and he didn’t sound at all like the dalek voice that normally comes out of the Kindle. Mum said I could stay on the iPad if I wanted to draw a picture of the writer reading the book. But I can’t draw good faces so I drew a picture of the Kindle talking. Then I labeled it ‘Kindle’ because Mum asked what it was. A fun recommended read for any and all adventurers and time traveling fans. And as always—a must read for Gaiman fans! I never know where he will take me.

Fortunately this smirk had a half-life of about one and a half seconds. The loss of smirk corresponded to the rise in volume of clanking footfalls. This is an excellent book to read aloud to 4th grade kids who are in the process of developing a sense for the absurdities of life. It is mainly about telling stories and that you can make up a great plot about anything, no matter how boring the so-called truth of every-day life is. Small things give you big ideas - and they don't have to make sense. In Ocean, you never name the boy-man narrator. Yet the importance of naming is essential to the plot. Why didn't you give him a name? Is he Everyman? (In the same way that Bod is Nobody?) The children and their parents get no names in Fortunately, the Milk, either. Coincidence? I'm sure Gaiman fans will wax poetically about the story's grand and imaginative plot. But I just can't. It's an okay story. I would tell parents to get it and read it to kids at bedtime. But it isn't something I would actively promote.You've said you wrote Fortunately, the Milk to "redeem" fathers (our word, not yours) after The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish. Did you sit down to write a story for fathers? Or did you have the idea for Milk and then think, "Aha! This could be a story to make amends to fathers after Goldfish"? I won't spoil anything (don't worry! Geez!), I just want to comment that if you ever been able to contain yourselves of reading aloud the lines of the wumpires (yes, you read correctly...wumpires), well I just can say that you have more selfcontrol than me! But can I plead my case Your Majesty?"I asked. "I do not know why I am here and what I have been accused of. And, by the way, I thought you were meant to be a Queen." If you decide to read it, keep in mind that it's a short story oriented for children, so please, don't harm the rating of this sweet book just because you were expecting "Neil Gaiman, the great mind behind Sandman and American Gods". Regardless, it is a delightful read. Especially for children. But it was a fun read for me also. I will must read his other works too.