Monday, April 7, 2014

Review: Neil Gamian's Fortunately, the Milk

Neil Gamian's Fortunately, the Milk is a wonderfully preposterous bit of exquisite nonsense. Well. I say nonsense. Once you accept the time-traveling stegosaurus, and the goopy green space aliens, everything else makes perfect sense. (Well, except the piranhas.)

The father, the main character of the story, gets interrupted on the way back home with some milk—all-important for breakfast cereal and tea, you see—and in the course of his adventures ends up saving the world almost, but not quite, entirely by accident. Along the way he meets pirates, dinosaurs, aliens, space police, wumpires, and one Angry Volcano God. (But no piranhas.) He meets them all out of order, of course, and timey shenanigans are used multiple times to save the day. Twice, at the very least. (Hey, that's high for (what's nominally) a children's book.)

The book is illustrated in a Seuss-like manner. Well—. The illustrations don't look at all like Seuss's work, but otherwise they've got the same kind of absurdity look to them. Unfortunately, as I'm writing this review from memory, I don't have the name of the illustrator at hand.

Final Verdict: 8/10. Well worth reading, but may not be worth buying if you don't have kids who'd enjoy it. I liked it, but I don't expect I'll be buying a copy. I've been very spoiled by fanfic. (Mind you, I probably 'should' buy a copy, to support the existence of such books. But....)

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