Sleepy Kittens by TK (Little Brown Young Readers)

Here's a bit of silliness that we couldn't resist. You will probably remember the scene in "Despicable Me" where Gru is reading to his new "adoptees" while they're playing up and blatantly not sleeping at bedtime until they've heard a story.

Gru comes up with this little masterpiece, a book with finger puppets - the three sleepy kittens.

A book was released not long after the original movie, and since then the book has been in and out of print a few times. With the resurgence of popularity in all things minion-shaped (and the release of Despicable Me 2) you can now obtain the book once again without paying those ridiculously exorbitant Ebay and Amazon prices.

Only...well here's a note of caution. If you have tiny babies, and they're just starting to show an interest in sitting on your lap while you read books - this is a brilliant little idea. You slide your fingers into the 'kitten' shapes on the book, and wiggle them around while telling the story of three sleepy kittens going about their daily business.

The quality of the book is pretty variable though. Cheap quality nylon kitties don't quite look as great as the ones in the movie, and although the illustrations are great, it's a bit of a bust for a six year old who loves the movie but isn't really at the stage of being entertained by daddy reading a 5 page story while wiggling his fingers around inside three bland looking puppets.

There are some fantastic Despicable Me story books from L & B for older readers but as we said earlier on in the review, your tinies - your really tinies - will find this book charming (and it's a board book so they can chew it or drool on it with little or no effect). The moral of this tale is that nothing looks as great in real life as it does in the movies :)

Charlotte's best bit: Kittens slurping milk and having their fur brushed

Daddy's Favourite bit: Even with my best Gru impression (which is a fairly easy thing for me to do, by the way, I certainly have the hairstyle for it) I couldn't really entertain Charlotte with this one - But it'll definitely be something to try out on my new niece in Cornwall next time we're visiting.