A Treasury of Tales for Five-Year-Olds

Gabby Dawnay's A Treasury of Tales for Five-Year-Olds is a big, cheerful bundle of stories and rhymes for 5 year olds, starring everyone from a stay-at-home mole to a bird who poops on a king.

What happens

It's the kind of book you can dip into at bedtime and pick whatever suits the mood. Some pieces are a few short lines of rhyme. Others are proper little stories with a beginning, a muddle and a happy ending.

The first one sets the tone. A mole decides to explore, digs all the way up to the surface in the middle of the night, looks around and decides it's rubbish up there. Better below!

Then there's Wanda the bookworm, who ignores the sign saying Please Do Not Eat the Books and discovers that the pictures taste of jellybean doughnuts. A bike that talks a nervous rider into lifting their feet off the ground. A bear who comes to school in a clever disguise and is only kept calm with cake. A tiny clownfish who convinces a great white shark that she's the scariest thing in the sea.

Old favourites get a twist too. In The North Wind and the Sun, the wind blows so hard that a woman ends up chasing her flying underwear. And Rapunzel is a rapping princess who never needed rescuing (her hair is basically a ladder).

Little ones will love the rude bits. A king who shouts that he's the boss of everything gets a very clear answer from a small bird flying over his head!

There are gentler ones too. A little witch asks her grandma for a spell to make the evening last forever. A mother camel who won't look after her baby is won round by a girl with a magic singing voice. Some stories finish with a little "Did you know?" fact, like why clownfish can hide in a stinging anemone.

One story, Supernova, is about a boy whose grandad has gone away forever. It's handled very softly, with stars and a rocket, but it might start a conversation if your family has lost someone.

It's a lovely one to share. If your reader is the sort who asks for the same story three nights in a row, there's plenty of choice here to keep you both going.

What to read next

If the rapping Rapunzel is the one they keep asking for, try Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes. It's fairy tales told in rhyme with a twist as well, though Dahl warns in the very first lines that his versions are much more gory.