Unfortunately By Alan Durant & Simon Rickerty

This book is based on the story-telling game 'Fortunately.. Unfortunately..', where one player has to come up with a fortunate scenario, then the other player has to come up with another unfortunate scenario to trip the first person up. My girls had never heard of this game before, but since reading the book have been playing it non-stop!

The book starts with a boy walking happily through the jungle on his own, when unfortunately.. he meets a big scary lion. Fortunately.. he finds a tree to climb and hide in. Unfortunately.. a snake sees him and tries to eat him. (You get the idea!)

This went on and on throughout the book much to the childrens' delight and has a funny ending instead of a normal happy ending which my girls found very amusing.

The illustrations in the book are nice and clear and the story overall is lighthearted and silly.

I really enjoyed the way that this book sparked my childrens' imagination and led to lots of story-telling and game playing, with extremely clever answers. My eldest daughter even managed to get me into an unfortunate situation that I couldn't think of a way out of!

Fortunately.. my girls really enjoyed it and would like to read it again.

Unfortunately.. (for me) they'll probably want it every day!
   

My score: 4/5   Kids score: 5/5

Let me know what you think!

Zoe and Beans The Magic Hoop! By Chloe & Mick Inkpen

Apparently there are three other 'Zoe and Beans' books, however this is the first one we've read or heard of.

The illustrations are lovely and the characters very endearing. At first glance I thought the book was aimed more towards girls than boys, however after reading it I'd say it was suited to both.

The main character is a little girl named Zoe. Zoe finds what she thinks is a normal hoop and tries to get her dog Beans to jump through it. Once he reluctantly does so, magical things start to happen as he changes from one animal into another with each jump through the hoop.

My 4 and 6 year old girls found it highly amusing and were giggling aloud at each turn of the page, trying to guess what would happen next. This is a book that I enjoyed reading as much as they enjoyed listening to.

Full of magic and sillyness, it's perfect for sharing at bedtime!

My score: 5/5   Kids score: 5/5

Let me know what you think!

The reason behind my blog...

We LOVE books in our family. My husband despairs at the amount of books that appear each month and fight for space on our numerous bookcases. He says that we have too many books. I say that you can't have enough!

Although we have SO many books, sometimes we just really fancy a new book to read. It occurred to me today that I can't be the only Mum who regularly visits the local library just to find that we've read all the books and there's no new ones available!

I think it's extremely important that I read my children a bedtime story every night and it is a great excuse to snuggle up together and take five minutes out of our busy schedules.

My aim is to blog every day, giving my review of each bedtime story that I've read to my children. I hope that other parents will read my blog and be able to pick out books for their children that they may or may not have heard of before and would really like to read.

I hope you enjoy my blog and can use it with your children to enjoy A Story Per Day...