Fortunately, the Milk Hardcover – Illustrated, September 17, 2013

If it is Gaiman it has to be good - and this is hilarious for adults and children. And every one inbetween and on different planets, in different time space continuum or a few million years ago. Just delightful. A perfect bedtime story for anyone. (You can have great sound effects and voices with this if you read ahead).

Very cute story, but at the end, was it all really true? You be the judge by the end of the story, you might get your answer!

Depending upon how you look at things, my kids are either very fortunate or dismally unfortunate. They get great stories all the time about, well, everything. So there is the story about the Troll Bridge and Goblin Town and, now, there is an excavation into Goblin Town going on that I haven't remembered to go take pictures of, yet, but I need to so that I can do a post on that, and, of course, DRAGONS! Sometimes, especially my daughter, the kids get exasperated with me because they have such a difficult time getting merely mundane answers from me. Sometimes, I almost feel bad about that.Sometimes.I mean, no one has ever just gone to the store or gone outside to play or, even, just gone to the bathroom. He's been abducted by aliens. And, when he comes back, he's been replaced by a robot duplicate or, possibly, a clone. We're never just having chicken for dinner; we're having dinosaur or, depending upon how many times I've been asked that question, one of the children.And I might would feel bad about it except I hear my children, delightedly, repeating those stories to their friends.All of that to say that I loved Neil Gaiman's new book, Fortunately, the Milk, about a father who has to go to the corner store to get milk for his kids' breakfast cereal (because, otherwise, they would have to use orange juice, which is not okay on cereal) and get abducted by aliens on the way home. This was a story after my own heart. It also has dinosaurs.My own stories don't have enough dinosaurs, I don't think.It's an illustrated book but not, really, a picture book. The one I have, the American version, is illustrated by Skottie Young. His art is whimsical and funky and fits well with the tone of the book. That does not stop me from also wanting the UK version of the book, illustrated by Chris Riddell, which is not so funky but looks no less interesting. Not that I will be getting a copy of the UK version, because I don't want to pay the shipping on it.So, yes, the story is whimsical and funky and just a lot of fun, taking off at weird tangents. It has everything you could possibly want from a story like this: aliens, dinosaurs, pirates, time travel... okay, well, it doesn't have cowboys, so I guess it doesn't have everything, but it has an awful lot. If you have young kids (or, even, if you don't), this is a great book to pick up. I'm sure it would make an excellent bedtime reading book. Even though I don't have young kids, I may make mine sit down and listen to it anyway.Maybe, that way they'll know I'm not the only one that does this.

A busy week had kept me from Gmail's PROMOTIONS section. The 100 messages it contained included one announcing a new Neil Gaiman book. I couldn't not look. For a lovely surprise, the Kindle edition ($7.99, I think, in the announcement) showed up at $4.49 today. I couldn't not buy.Quick summary: A story-in-a-story tall tale (think "To Think that I Saw it on Mulberry Street" for older kids (the publisher says ages 8-12; I'd guess that read-alouds could go to 6)), without rhyme, with a better resolution, and with dinosaurs, outer space snot-monsters, pirates, wumpires, a volcano god, cameos for pirahnas and horses with stars on their sides, and a giant-sized slew of temporo-spatial paradoxes.I read it 1 1/4 times, backing up to the start when Larry looked at my screen to see why I was laughing. (He laughed, too.)The narrator, a boy who's probably about 8 or 9 years old but is never identified by age or name (though we see his picture) and his kid sister are home with their dad while their mom goes off on a trip to present a paper about lizards.The morning after her departure, they have a problem:"We can't eat our cereal," said my sister, sadly."I don't see why not," said my father. "We've got plenty of cereal. There's Toastios and there's muesli. We have bowls. We have spoons. Spoons are excellent. Sort of like forks, only not as stabby.""No milk," I said.So he heads off to the corner store for milk. Most of the story is his explanation of why that takes ages and ages.As I mentioned, we both laughed. Many times.I haven't yet mentioned the lovely and intricate cartoons by Skottie Young that illustrate the book, or the occasionally intricate and almost always funny sentences, such as the openingThere was only orange juice in the fridge. Nothing else that you could put on cereal, unless you think that ketchup or mayonnaise or pickle juice would be nice on your Toastios, which I do not, and neither did my little sister, although she has eaten some pretty weird things in her day, like mushrooms in chocolate.*Not to mention simpler sentences such as"How does a volcano know so much about transtemporal meta-science?" asked one of the pale green aliens.So yeah, I liked it. Loved it. If I had relatives or friends with kids between 6 and 10, I'd buy it for them in a flash.*The real footnote got my first laugh.

Another entertaining children's story by Neil Gaiman. This was a follow up to The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, and features the dad going to the store to buy his children some milk for breakfast. Only, he is gone for way too long and takes ages to come home. When he gets home, the children ask him what took him so long and he embarks on this great story of how he was on his way home but was abducted by aliens and so on and so forth, from aliens to pirates to dinosaurs, he regales the children with his adventures as he tried to make his way back home to them.And then the end, with the little twist, was a clever little ending to the story.

A cheerful and fun kids' book but not as complex as his other books. I'm sorry, because I know he's a national treasure and I loved The Graveyard Book and The Ocean at the End of the Lane. This book was much shorter and probably aimed at younger kids than his other books. It was a very quick and light read. The humour is more light and zany. After reading the other NG books I felt "Wow!" and had to collect my thoughts. After reading this - "nice entertainment for the kids", but no "wow" moment.

I bought 2 of these for my grandsons aged 6 and 7 as part of their Christmas present. They havent had them yet but I have read the book several times and it is a delight. My daughter ordered one for herself ...she's in her 40's after reading one of them too. The story is a great romp if you are going to be reading it to your children. If they are old enough they will love reading the story themselves and the illustrations are amazing too.It is nice that for once the hero of the story is the Dad too.

Although nominally a kid's book, this is first and foremost a Neil Gaiman book, a beast that defies genre classification and all the usual demographics. It might not be Neil's most advanced or ambitious piece of work, but it's infused with that same sense of imagination, adventure and wonderment that you expect from his stuff, whether it's pitched at older or younger audiences. The story is fun, entertaining and pleasantly off-beat, and there's something undeniably (albeit unconventionally) cute about it. The illustrations are a nice addition, and the video inserts are a very cool touch, allowing you to sit back and enjoy the author's readings from various sections of text.

I think the publisher should immediately print up some "Fortunately, the Milk" t-shirts with a logo and the quote, "Where There's Milk, There's Hope!"I only love me some Neil Gaiman (comics, novels, short stories AND, best of all, children's books -- prose type or picture books, doesn't matter).I enjoyed the hell out of OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE, and I thought CHU'S DAY OUT was so cute I bought a copy for a friend, but my pick for BEST NEIL GAIMAN BOOK OF 2013 (and maybe the best book of the century) is definitely, FORTUNATELY, THE MILK.My daughter -- who read it after me -- swears Mr. Gaiman has been following me around for the last decade or so (apparently I, too, stop and talk to local shop persons and even strangers, often returning HOURS after I'm expected back; and I seem to have a propensity for telling whoppers).I don't want to dissect it any further, because that would be like pulling the wings off of a mayfly, but I would like to say that I only loved Prof. Steg and the Wumpires. And I only love those last lines from dad, about how he can prove it all really happened. :)Personally, I LOVE the Chris Riddell illustrations in the British edition the most (I also have a copy of the U.S. version, illustrations by Skottie Young). This book has been on the (Middle age Chilren's) NYTimes bestseller list for two months and counting and deservedly so! It's just whimsical as hell, and does a great job displaying both the sense of wonder and the craft inherent in the act of story-telling.Now, I must traverse the staircase in our home, past Austrialio-pithecine-like spiders, being careful not to awaken the six-foot plus Kangaroo which often sleeps near our doorstep at nights (we call him Kongaroo) and go in search of something to drink. Fortunately, there's chocolate milk in the fridge.