My Bedtime Anytime Storybook is a collection of short stories for children written by V. Gilbert Beers that was published in 1992 and gifted to my siblings and me back in 1995. As the self-proclaimed book hoarder collector of the family, I claimed this book for my personal library after we all grew up, and this summer I read the whole thing out loud to the almost-three-year-old that haunts this place. Each day before naptime, we'd visit our colorful friends to supposedly be entertained and learn valuable moral lessons about forgiveness, helpfulness, working together, sharing, pride, etcetera etcetera.
The stories feature the little adventures and scuffles of six animal friends: McWhiskers the mouse (quite obviously the author's favorite character and the most virtuous of the bunch), Bru the bruin bear (the one who has the most lessons to learn but never seems to actually learn them), Puddles the blue hippo, Tux the penguin, KaWally the koala bear, and PJ the zebra (all of whom are definitely secondary characters to McWhiskers and Bru). While the book is well-intentioned and the stories have the potential to teach good lessons, the moral is often vague and overshadowed by other bad characteristics displayed by the characters in the story. For example, we may be reading a story about Bru and his pridefulness, and in the process of Bru learning how wrong it is to be proud, all the other characters get angry, yell at him, even call him names. While we get the hazy impression that pridefulness is wrong, we never read anything about anger or unkindness or see Bru's friends apologize to him for their own moral missteps. The endings are extremely weak and fail to drive the moral lesson home, and on top of that, the stories are largely forgettable.
The biggest selling point is definitely the colorful, cartoonish illustrations by Tim O'Connor that draw the eye on every page and is what I remember being attracted to as a child flipping through this book. But that hardly makes up for the poor content of the stories. While this book wasn't terrible and there were a few stories that I liked, overall I'd recommend skipping My Bedtime Anytime Storybook. There is certainly better material out there particularly if you're looking for something to help teach your children Christian values.
What's your favorite read-aloud storybook?
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