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Kindle Edition eBooks Details
  • 05/2014
  • B00KDZQ736
  • 220 pages
  • $2.99
A Month of Bedtime Stories: Thirty-One Bite-Sized Tales of Wackiness and Wonder for the Retiring Child
A cow that eats bananas and lives in the trees! Bees that pilot submarines through uncharted puddles! An elevator that descends to the centre of the Earth! Cowardly dinosaurs! Cockney pirates! Alien Dogs! Vertiginous squirrels! Time-traveling slugs! Fish in spacesuits! Hedgehogs disguised as fish! Cows disguised as ants! Disco-dancing horses!
Reviews
A fantastic collection of hilarious stories

My daughter and I love this collection of short stories. They make us both laugh out loud. They have a theme running through each story, a predictability my daughter loves almost as much as the fact that she is always the central character of each chapter. I love the totally wacky side - the cat and canary being one of my favourite cameos, but I love more than anything watching my daughters expressions change from hysterical laughter (the cry of 'no bum biting' in The Battle of the Ants) to a grimace (wait till you find out where Mrs Teasel keeps the baked beans). This collection will become a firm favourite. The only thing is it won't last a month - neither of us can leave it to just one story a night.

Grady Harp, Vine Voice, Amazon Hall of Fame Top 100 Reviewer

Australian author Neil Roy McFarlane likely has as fine a sense of humor as anyone writing today. This excellent book is rich with short stories (he says they each should take 15 minutes to read but that doesn't include the time for chuckling) that are thirty-one in number and infinite in imagination.

One of the many aspects of McFarlane's writing is that each of the stories is addressed to the listener, as though each story was a past experience of the one to whom they are being read. Involvement is instantaneous. But oh what adventures await. Looney, wacky, imaginative and borderline crazy tales that McFarlane pens with absolute abandon.

Within the confines of this little book are the following stories (to give you an idea how wonderfully zany they are):Nanoodle Snagglebottom, The Submarine Full of Bees, Underground Adventure With an Annoying Rabbit, Toothpaste at the Centre of the Earth, Captain Slinky and the Cockney Pirates, Journey to the Clouds, The Battle of the Ants, Mrs Teasel's Magic Finger, Hunt for the Sausage Monster, Tommy McBear and the Magic Stamp Tree, Jeanie and the Astrofish, The Vertiginous Squirrel, The Executive Mocking Birds, Professor Itchypants and the King of the Fleas, The Dentist That Time Forgot, Planet of the Grapes, The Roman Werewolves, The Teabag Witch and the Rubbish Rabbits, Kung Fu Legends of Grasshopper Glade, The Ice Cream Queen of Thunder Mountain, Ethel the Soap Fairy, The Thirty-Nine Bottles, Princess Coco's Royal Toilet, Underwater Carrots, Not Mushroom in the Well, The Pied Piper of Kilimanjaro, Mission Imcheddarble, The Waiters Who Weren't, Polygonoporus Giganticus, Shootout at the Deer Sisters' Hideout, and The Kangaroos That Went `Zzzzzzt!' (The Final Adventure!).

Now, if the adult reader can leave this book of tales at a child's bedside when the lights go out then that adult will be missing all the private laughter of revisiting all these terrific stories. Highly recommended.

San Francisco Book Review

I like this book so much because it always comes up with new stories that are funnier than the last one. Every story is about you. In each one, you run out of something to eat, and then in the end you get bonked on the head or have a really bad memory or something so you don't remember what happens. My favorite story so far is the one with the bees. The bees and you find a monster, a different type of life form, in a submarine that's in a puddle. In that story you were trying to find honey.  Another one that I liked was about the sausage monster. The sausage monster is a monster bird that lays sausages. And I also liked it because the Hulk and SpiderMan were in that story. There are lots of stories that I like. I keep trying to get Mama to read more than one at night time – there are enough for a whole month but I don't want to take that long to read them all! - Reviewed by Raif, Age 5

Setting the bar for bedtime with wonderfully rich stories

Delightful trip into the land of make believe, Neil Roy McFarlane has created a collection of wonderful, creative, and silly trips into the imagination. Each story is about 20 to 30 minutes long, filled with humor for the adults and just the right amount of absurdity for any child to enjoy. Reminiscent of the If You Give a Mouse a Cookie type of tale, each one starts with remembering a mundane occurrence that happened during the day, like eating bangers and mash ( sausage and potatoes), that led to something strange, which cause another thing to happen and on and on, deeper into the land of cause and effect, leading to a whopping story brilliantly relayed of how the reader ended back in bed. Written with a great love of vocabulary, with a musical style, I thing this book is not a month of bedtime stories, but a lifetime of them.

Vine Voice

The author kindly provided this Kindle edition for me to review.

As you'll probably be aware, there's a story for each night of a long month; so some spares left for the other five shorter months. Actually it's unlikely there will be any unread stories in the shorter months; indeed I'd say one would do well to make them all last a fortnight.

Each of the stories are around nine pages long, with around 240ish words per page on my iPad using kindle reader.

The basic premise is each story is one's son or daughter is the central character and has forgotten an event that happened today. Each story will last around 15 - 20 minutes ... depending on the giggle-factor; (mostly quite high in our house with my seven-year-old daughter).

What I particularly like is the overt silliness that children enjoy with the hidden humour for the adult reader. The stories often involve the child looking in the woods for an item ... potatoes, honey, eggs, a postage stamp, an eraser, an ice cream ... and then there are some fantastic characters (Doctor Sebastian Slug with a PhD in Timemachinology) and situations that thrill the child and remind the adult (a grassy knoll anyone?)

Anyway; my daughter and I very much enjoyed the stories and we didn't manage to make them last a month, but we have read them several times. Have a browse inside the book before purchase; I'd be surprised if you didn't like it!

News
02/16/2015
Honorary Mention at London Book Festival

"A Month of Bedtime Stories" received an honorary mention at the 2014 London Book Festival.

Formats
Kindle Edition eBooks Details
  • 05/2014
  • B00KDZQ736
  • 220 pages
  • $2.99
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