In Fortunately, the Milk, a dad heads out the door to purchase a bit of milk so his children can have their breakfast cereal and he can have a spot of tea. He tells a wild tale of encounters with aliens and time-travelling dinosaurs and what-not, which waylaid his return with the milk. Fortunately, the milk saved him time and time again. Thus, the title. Although the title is interesting, the various difficulties he encountered weren't. Both Sean and I found ourselves yawning through the escapades and plugging away to get to the end of the story. We did read the whole book, but it was a stretch to say it was very interesting. It just sort of fell flat for us.
Perhaps it doesn't with others, but I'm wondering why it garnered so many great reviews on Amazon. One publication declared that he "knocked it out of the park with this imaginative tale." Really? We discovered that our library had billed it as a book for "Tweens" with that label on the spine of the book. I doubt tweens would find it any more interesting than my six year old did. It was all rather frivolous. I'm not saying I've given up on Gaiman, but the last two books haven't encouraged me to seek him out more than any other author.
2 comments:
I was introduced to Neil Gaiman through his Sandman series of graphic novels, which was also my introduction to graphic novels. I really liked that series but it's an adult series and pretty dark in nature. The only children's book I've read of his is The Wolves in the Walls and I loved it. My kids did too.
I'll have to give The Wolves in the Walls a try, especially since I loved The Graveyard Book so much.
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