Michelle
I thought I’d share a gorgeous bedtime book with you all. The cover on this is really eye catching and vibrant, with metallic silver detail around both the cover and the back. The Beasties is written by Jenny Nimmo and illustrated by Gwen Millwar. It encourages the reader (and listeners) to join Daisy, who tries to get to sleep in her new bed, and creates an array of stories with the aid of Weevil, Floot and Ferdinand who creep into her bedroom and whilst they are busy playing with toys under her bed, Daisy uses the sounds they make to imagine separate stories. She finally meets them when she has no need for their prompts and is no longer afraid of either the room, or making her own stories up, so she becomes her own storyteller.
The Beasties is a very soothing book filled with the power of great bedtime stories and storytellers. It brings in what may be seen as scary elements (The Beasties) and makes them less scary by giving them a soothing storytelling role. The individual stories inside cover a double spread each, and are imaginative, coupled with bright attractive illustrations. The Beasties is published by Egmont, ISBN 978-1-4052-4335-3
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Michelle’s right – the illustrations are magical, and the children really get swept away in the stories. I can imagine it would be especially nice for children who are a little scared of the dark or worried about monsters under the bed.
The only thing I would say is don’t read it to a young child who has NO such monster fears or you might accidentally introduce a fear. My 3.5 year old wouldn’t be able to keep listening attentively through the whole story to get to the nice bit, where the monsters aren’t scary after all. She would just focus on the initial concept of monsters under then bed and that would be it!
My kids are 3 and 5 and loved this book and didnt see it as frightening at all that there were creatures living under the bed – what I really liked was that they were inspired to tell their own stories to each other after they had read it