Review: Fortunately, The Milk
← Received: Summer 2013Review: The Privilege of the Sword →
Review: Fortunately, The Milk
Posted on 2013-09-20 at 14:28 by Dave
Fortunately, the Milk Written and Read by Neil Gaiman Length: 58 minutes
It should be a walk down the street, but on a father’s trip to buy some milk for his children’s cereal (and probably also his tea), aliens show up (as they do), and kidnap him. Dad escapes by breaking the time space continuum and lands himself on a 17th century pirate ship, and here - things get a little weird.
Throughout the rest of the book there are vampyrs, time traveling dinosaurs, exploding volcanoes, oh-so-self-fulfilling prophecies, and other fun things.
Neil Gaiman’s Fortunately, the Milk is at the exact opposite end of his fiction from The Ocean at the End of the Lane, and I’m all for it. I love that Gaiman can write something as staggeringly powerful and hauntingly personal as The Ocean at the End of the Lane, and then turn around and bring us something as absurd and silly as this. It’s a Dahl-esque tour with Dad as hero, with a stegosaurus inventor riding shotgun in a hot air balloon (sorry! Floaty-Ball-Person-Carrier). It reminded me of James and the Giant Peach and Gaiman’s own The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish as well as his poem “The Day the Saucers Came.” If you enjoyed those books, this one’s right up your alley. It’s a fun book, completely devoid of anything creepy/scary, and I can’t wait to listen to it with my children.
Gaiman himself narrates it, and really, who else could possibly read it as well as him? He’s such a commanding reader, and it’s treat to hear him cut loose and be silly for an hour.
Professor Steg, the stegosaurus inventor says it best: “Where there’s milk, there’s hope.” Well here, there be milk. And lots of it.