By Neil Gaiman
A dad nips out for milk and comes back with the most gloriously ridiculous excuse ever told.
Dad goes out to buy milk for the breakfast cereal and takes ages. When he finally gets back, he explains why: he was abducted by aliens, captured by pirates, nearly sacrificed to a volcano god, and rescued by a time-traveling dinosaur in a hot-air balloon — and through all of it, he heroically protected the milk. His two children are fairly sure he's making it up.
It has the same anything-can-happen engine as Dahl at his most inventive — piranha, pirates, and a stegosaurus professor all in a hundred short, pictured pages. A child who loved the pure imaginative daftness of Dahl, and doesn't want anything heavy, gets a book that's all fizz and no ache. It's short and mostly picture, so it's a gentle, funny win for a child who's still building stamina.