"This Is Not a Fairy Tale" by Will Mabbit and Fred Blunt (Picture Puffin)

Oh yes indeed, we were cheering and hooraying at the core theme of this book. If there's one thing we can't stand it's drippy princesses!
Thankfully Sophie is in charge of storytelling duties, and in "This Is NOT a Fairy Tale" she quickly shows Dad how it's done, and comes up with the sort of story that Charlotte absolutely loves.

Now, you are probably familiar with the way fairy tales usually go. There's a princess, she's locked in a tower, the tower is in the middle of a forest of thorn bushes right?

WRONG!

Sophie is having none of that. Her princess wants to ride the horse, don the armour - and she's got a fantastic way of dealing with pesky thorn bushes too!

Better still, this fairy tale swiftly involves a transforming robot (far better for shinning up a tower with booster jets than relying on someone else's hair, EW!) and a fine way of dealing with a fire breathing dragon.

(At this point a brief pause. We felt most sorry for the dragon because he ends up "getting the point" in a rather owchy way. YOWL!)

By the end of this tale we were cheering for the Princess, who swiftly rescues the baldy wimpy Prince (not a word about baldy wimps OK? Not a word!) and devises a brilliant tea party to celebrate.

All this while Grandad (who was supposed to be reading the story while Dad cooked dinner) snoozed through the whole thing (at least he gets woken up in a funny way at the end).

Will and Fred are a dream team, they've put together a fab and entertaining story where the princess gets HER time in the limelight (rightly so, sayeth Charlotte and I) and the Prince - well he's a bit useless really.

Loads of cackling good gags, fabulous illustrations, put this one high on your shopping list if you're fed up to the back teeth with weedy simpering princesses and smug macho princes.

Charlotte's best bit: The owchy sword / dragon interface moment. That's going to leave a mark. Ooch.

Daddy's favourite bit: A rip-roaring brilliant non-fairy-tale fairy tale with transforming bash-em-up robots, I mean it really doesn't get any better than this!

(Kindly supplied for review)

"This is Not a Fairy Tale" by Will Mabbit and Fred Blunt is out now, published by Picture Puffin.