The Midnight Gang product reviews

I requested to review this book because I have two young children who are currently sharing a bedroom and they spend hours playing together in the dark before finally falling asleep where ever they ran out of energy (not in their own beds) and I wanted to see if this story would give me an idea about what they get up to in the dark before falling asleep.

This first thing you will note about this book is that the illustrations are beautiful and Ann James has done an amazing job although I think this is lost on my four year old who likes bright images. My one and a half year old on the other hand quite enjoyed the pictures and went to sleep "reading" the book.

The story is about Brenda, who leaves her crib in the middle of the night to go and play with her friends at the park doing things that you could only dream about and then she says goodbye to her friends and goes back to bed. In the morning her mother takes her and her older sister to the park to play and makes a point of saying that Brenda is too little to play which is quite funny considering she did all of that and more during the night.

I loved how during the escape Brenda crawls out the cat flap and somehow loses her nappy so she has her midnight escapade in the nude and then on her way back to bed she pops her nappy back on. It took me until the end of the story to realise she didn't have her nappy with her but my four year old was quick to spot it.

This book really highlights the fact that babies and children are able to do a lot more than what we think they can do which I'm starting to realise every day as I watch my kids grow up and accomplish new tasks which I thought would be too difficult for them.

After reading this book I'm pretty glad my youngest doesn't know how to open the door we close every night (at least I hope he doesn't) and that we don't have a cat door that he can escape through!