A Diary of Bedtime Stories


Children - Fable
70 Pages
Reviewed on 01/13/2015
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Author Biography

Jill Vance worked as a ghost writer for many years before deciding the constraints of only writing about plots and characters chosen by others was too limiting.
In 2013 she wrote the first book under her own name, The Other Side of the Door which is a collection of short stories with a twist in the tale.
Jill published a book of children's fables, A Diary of Bedtime Stories, in 2014 and is currently working on a second one.

Towards the end of 2014 Jill published her second book of short stories with a twist, Dark between Shadows.
This was closely followed, (1st January 2015), by a longer single short story called Wrapped With Thorns.

    Book Review

Reviewed by Emily-Jane Hills Orford for Readers' Favorite

Sophie and Kiera are twins. In many ways they were very much the same, but they were also quite different. While Sophie was gentle and sometimes timid, Kiera was confident, outgoing and often impatient. However, the two girls were inseparable and one thing they had in common was their love of a good bedtime story. And their mother was full of wonderful stories: fantasies that included castles, witches and magical creatures. Every night it was a different story, every night the twins heard something that had happened to their mother when she was a child. As the children listened with rapt attention for the most part, only occasionally interrupted by their curious questions, the mother shared her childhood experiences and learned something more about her twin daughters with each new story shared. Each story was attached to a day in the week, beginning with Monday and ending on Sunday. It was while telling Sunday’s story about the secret garden and the pixies that the twin’s mother started to realize that Sophie had her gift of magic. Sophie was like her mother, only her gift was stronger.

Jill Vance has written a wonderful fairy tale in A Diary of Bedtime Stories that will capture the hearts of young and old alike. It’s the type of story that stays with you for a long time, a story that demands to be read over and over again. As the reader progresses through the daily entries of magical experiences, there is a sense of wonderment shared. The reader begins to believe that the author, the narrator, is really a magical person herself. After all, she has so many magical stories from her own childhood to share. But, then again, childhood is something of a magical time and the gift of being a good writer, a superb storyteller, is also a gift of magic. To conclude her vision of magic and fantasy, the author provides the reader with a poem for each of the days, beginning with: “Monday’s dreams are a special place....”

RFY

This is a wonderful collection for the little ones! The grandkids enjoyed having a brand new story every night before bed. They also loved the beautiful gaily colored illustrations that went with every tale. The stories are creative and totally unique, and thanks to “The Mysterious Elf Tree” they are now demanding a “Baby Doll Cat”, which according to the story is an incredibly fluffy and beautiful cat and of course now they want one each. Each story seems to come from the heart, and I love how they were told, mother to daughters, as if each were a real adventure from her childhood.
This is a very special collection and I am so glad I came across it!

Caroline

I am 9 years old and I like this book because there is a super interesting story for each day of the week. Each story is told by a mommy to her twins, Sophie and Kiera. It was kinda like reading a story in a story. And their mother was really good at telling stories about what happened when she was little and Sophie seems to always get what her mom was taking about and more. Those parts are always interesting and made me think Sophie also had her own magical stories to tell, too, just like her mom. I thought the parts about Kiera were funny like with the glass of water and my favorite stories were the ones about Prince, Dolmen, Robin and the Northern Lights.

What was even more cool was there were things in these stories I didn’t know about like the Dolmen and the Northern Lights that are really really real and it may the stories even more magical and made me think that these stories might actually be real. I can’t wait to read book 2 of this series and hope to see the Dolmens, a Robin and the Northern lights one day. ♥