However, the Arabian Nights-style format can be a little confusing, and the time line (which spans centuries) can be difficult to keep straight—this is not a book to put down and leave for a while.

But to have your artwork where we know somebody has painstakingly cut out and put it together, how do you get that to your editor and to the art designer? But I think that while the book is composed of stories, the stories come together to result in the symphony.On an evening, when I was a very small child, an old woman came to the great silver gate, and twisting her hands among the rose roots told me this: I was not born with this mark. So, what’s something that you like to do when you need to clear your head and focus on creating a book?

And so, there’s a black cat that kind of escorts you through the garden at night, and there’s different sounds, and it’s sort of sensory in all kinds of different ways, looking and hearing and, um, ah, touching. Some layers were more interesting than others, so the book didn’t always hold my interest, which is the main reason I’m not rating it higher. Toddlers will love interacting with their favourite In the Night Garden characters in this bright, vibrant lift-the-flap book. Berger’s pen is just as adept as her scissors as she twists a turn of phrase into its simplest and most evocative form, as when “bats swoop and glide in the bluing sky. The first few tales continued in this fashion but then the descriptive style became more varied and less self consciously dramatic.And I don't just mean a few pinpricks from my eyes like I've had happen for a handful of tales over the years. Invite your childs In the Night Garden friends to their birthday party in this magical adventure made just for them. It took millennia for the stories to be collected that eventually became the fairy tales we know: Grimm's Fairy Tales, The Eddas, One Thousand and One Nights.

In 2007, Ladybird Books published a full In the Night Garden range of books, some had lifted the flap features ( The Prettiest Flower, 2007) and some had sounds from the programme ( What a Noisy Pinky Ponk! If I seem to be overly prosaic and prone to hyperbole about this book, (I should say books, since it's a duology, but the two volumes fit together like one work) it's just a symptom of how much it has crept into every fiber of me. One Thousand and One Nights meets European folktales and modern fantasy (think, perhaps, a somewhat more self-serious Princess Bride) in a nested series of linked short stories. And so for the first time ever I happen to hate a dreamy book full of fairy-tales with a fiery passion.The trouble for me is that the short story makes it easy to put down and go do something else, as it's often a natural break in the plot and action, so it took me far too long to finish. Would you try to isolate each section, analyze the single instrument's contribution to the overall whole? Sit down with In the Night Garden and read the first few pages up to the point where the girl starts to tell "the first tale I was able to read, from the crease of my left eyelid. Learn about shapes and colours with Igglepiggle, Upsy Daisy, Makka Pakka and their friends in the Night Garden. But still, the hole answered the bell when he rang, and he had to scurry to bed with his head down to avoid looking it in the eye.