Book Review

The Neil Gaiman Audio Collection
5/5 stars

The new year started out with several reading challenges. In addition to reading music and I'm participating in another group where we read a featured writer. At Author!Author! our writer for January is Neil Gaiman. The British writer is not only quite prolific, he's pretty easy on the eyes and his voice makes for an incredible session with one of his audiobooks.

I started off with this children's audio collection. I really enjoyed it. If you don't know how wonderful children stories can be, you'll really enjoy this. The stories are fantastical, absurdly funny. Gaiman’s narration rocks. If someone had read to me as a child the way Gaiman reads, I would have likely developed a love for fantasy and fairy tales. Not all is lost though. I might be a grown woman, but there is a part of us that enjoys revisiting our childhood. Gaiman’s work is a gateway to celebrating being young and being open to the outrageous.

This collection contains four stories: one is a poem about hair where animals and dancers and a host of fanciful characters play. Another is the story about a boy who swaps his dad for goldfish, another about wolves in the walls, and the last is about an exotic princess who refuses to talk. Sometimes collections can be uneven; some stories are better than others. With this collection, I’d have a hard time picking a favorite.

So you’ve got great stories, a great storyteller but there is more. Gaiman’s young daughter, Maddy interviews him about his work and desire to write. Fun, fun, fun. I keep saying I’m not into fantasy, but I think Gaiman is quickly making me a convert.