“There was only orange juice in the fridge.”

From Neil Gaiman’s Fortunately, the Milk.

When a boy and his younger sister go to have their long-standing tradition of cereal for breakfast, they discover a terrible thing: they are totally out of milk. Their mother is away at a conference so she left their father in charge, but the milk ran out with the hot chocolate last night. Desperate to get milk for the kids’ cereal (and his tea), their father heads off to the corner store to buy some milk. However, the trip that should have taken just minutes takes forever. The boy and his sister are pretty sure that their father must have started talking to someone and lost track of the time, but when their father finally comes home, he tells them that something quite different and unexpected happened instead. Their father begins recounting his adventure by telling the children that after he quickly purchased some milk, he was pulled up onto a flying silver ship by little green aliens; he was only able to escape by opening an emergency exit on the ship (to the aliens’ protest of messing with the space-time continuum). After falling from the space ship, their father faced a wild adventure that involved pirates, a stegosaurus with a broken time travel balloon, milk-worshipping people, and an ancient volcano, and intergalactic police. While the children are skeptical of their father’s wild journey, he doesn’t let their negativity stop him from recounting the many unbelievable happenings that he and the milk, fortunately, survived.

A delightful, quick read that will captivate readers of all ages. Neiman creates a story that is humorous and filled lots of twists and turns that will captivate both child and adult readers. Fortunately, the Milk is a very clever story that detailed but simple, which makes it the perfect family read!