Fortunately, The Milk

Fortunately, The Milk by Neil Gaiman is a funny story for 7 year olds that begins with an empty fridge and gets completely out of hand.

What happens

There's no milk. There is orange juice, ketchup, mayonnaise and pickle juice, none of which anybody wants on their cereal.

Mum is away at a conference, presenting a paper on lizards. Before she left she gave Dad a list of instructions roughly a mile long, and he repeated the whole thing back to her without looking up from his paper. Even the bit about not flushing the upstairs loo.

So Dad goes to the corner shop for milk. And he is gone for ages.

When he finally gets back, he has an explanation. A silver disc was hovering over Marshall Road. A beam of light pulled him up into it. The green globby people inside wanted him to sign the planet over to them.

He escaped through a door marked DO NOT OPEN FOR ANY REASON and fell out of the sky into the sea, where pirates fished him out and threatened to slit his throat. He talked them into letting him walk the plank instead, on the grounds that people who walk the plank always get rescued.

He was right, obviously. He got rescued by a stegosaurus in a hot air balloon.

Professor Steg is the best thing in the book. He's an inventor. His time machine is a cardboard box with a big red button, and he insists coconuts are called hard-hairy-wet-white-crunchers because he named them first.

After that there are volcano gods, a stolen emerald and a prophecy that arrived last Wednesday. And the whole time Dad keeps hold of the milk, because the milk is the entire point.

Here's what makes it work though. The children keep interrupting.

They point out that piranhas don't live in the sea. They want to know how a stegosaurus managed a rope ladder. The little sister asks, quite reasonably, whether there are going to be any ponies.

So your reader gets the story and the arguing at the same time, which is much funnier than either on its own. It's a lovely one to read out loud, especially if you're willing to do the voices.

One tiny thing. The pirates offer to cut Dad's throat and a village plans to sacrifice him to a volcano. Both are played entirely for laughs and nothing actually happens, but it's there if your child takes threats literally.

What to read next

If your reader enjoys a story that nobody sensible believes a word of, There's A Yeti In The Playground! is in the library as well. Izzy tells that one, at top speed, while every grown-up around her keeps saying she's exaggerating.