Review: "Bedtime Stories for Privileged Children" by Daniel Foxx

Bedtime Stories for Privileged Children by Daniel Foxx
Published November 2024 via Monoray
★★★

Now put on your designer pyjamas and tuck yourself into your bespoke silk bed sheets and sip your 230 Fifth King Cocoa. It's time for a bedtime story of a type that only the lucky few get. These are not your average bedtime stories with fairies and ogres—these are stories in which Clementine rides off in her private helicopter, and Cucumber fires Nanny 2, and Coriander dresses up as poverty for Halloween, and Crumpet forces Nanny 3 to eat mud, and Caviar is horrified that the neighbor's dog doesn't get private French lessons, and Cashew fires Nanny 1.

I made a lot of that up,* but you get the gist. Think short, think verrrrry snarky, think definitely not appropriate for children in need of a bedtime story (except, perhaps, for those from a certain class that I do not rub shoulders with, but what do I know). I'm not sure who the ideal audience is for this, really, but I'm guessing it would go over well as a stocking stuffer or novelty book to keep on a bathroom shelf.

(If your stockings aren't already filled with blood diamonds and your bathroom shelves aren't home to the lesser of your Fabergé egg collection, of course.)

The entire thing is very ridiculous, which is exactly as intended. I think I might have preferred a bit more plot and/or character development (one character followed throughout, as in My Naughty Little Sister?), but then that's probably beside the point. In any case, I think you'll know just from the description whether this might be a book for you!

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*I don't have the book at hand while writing this, so I've picked arbitrary c-named foods for names (very in line with the book, I promise) and also fudged the details of the activities...except for the constant nanny abuse. It's my poor upbringing, I suppose.