This Book is Not a Bedtime Story
As every parent or childminder knows, bedtime for small children can be a very fraught experience. Even the promised story can trigger anxiety, delaying tactics or full-on resistance, so calling this book This Is Not a Bedtime Story is a clever way to turn everything on its head. A gang of scary monsters try very hard indeed to be as horrid as possible, but they turn out to be cute, silly and even a little sleepy.
A group of gentle animals look on and wonder what all the fuss is about as the biggest monster serves up all the clichés to scare us: a haunted house, a pirate ship, a creepy forest and even the deep, deep Dark that so many of us don’t like very much at all. But we discover that there just isn’t anything to be scared of.
Eoin McLaughlin’s simple, funny rhymes and Robert Starling’s strong colour palettes and dramatic double-page spreads make this great fun for carers and young children to read together. Getting the monster to roar as loudly as possible
may not make this the quietest book for bedtime, but of course this is an enjoyable book for anytime, really. And when the big grumpy monsters make friends with the sensible little animals and finally settle down, you hope that any other little monsters in your care will also settle down and, maybe, just maybe, they too will fall happily asleep.
