Review: Personalised Children’s Stories from Bang On Books!

In our house, storytime can be really precious. Our eldest is now old enough to read for himself (which he does, he devours books faster than I can find them) but he still appreciates it when I take the time to read to him. Our youngest is still learning to read, so she LOVES storytime.

She has a lot of books that feature regularly. Some of them are stories, longer chapter books, rhymes and verses or even books with no story at all. She particularly likes books where you have to find tiny details in big pictures.

So when I was contacted about a service that lets you create your own personalised storybooks, I knew it would blow her tiny five-year-old mind.

The service is called Bang On Books. Bang On Books produces a small range of titles designed to be customised to fit your own little readers. The books feature fun stories with a leading protagonist that just might be a bit familiar! Currently you can choose between Santa Socks (a festive story), The Golden Key and Unicorn Oo. We chose Unicorn Oo as evidence (mostly scattered about her room in cuddly, plastic or poster form) suggests she’s quite a fan of unicorns.

Bang On Books has a colourful, user-friendly website that guides you through the process of personalising your chosen book. You enter a personalised message, your child’s name and a photo and that’s about it! I found the process to be really simple which is great because not all parents love technology as much as we do.

The book arrived really quickly (easily within a week) and we were really excited to show it to Claudia. The quality of the book is great. Considering these are printed on-spec for each request, the overall print and paper quality is indistinguishable from any you might pick up in a bookshop.  It feels like a quality book which helps keep it feeling like quite a special present.

When Claudia saw we got her a new book she was really excited. When she saw it was about unicorns she was even more excited. As it began to dawn on her that this book was about her, you could see she was totally amazed! She loved the parts that had her photo and she was totally immersed in the idea that this was HER adventure.

As we read through the book she sang the unicorn’s special song and chatted about all the characters she was meeting in the book. Once the story was finished she immediately started flicking back through it to look at the pages with her photo on them.

Unicorn Oo is now in HEAVY rotation at storytime, beating off competition from ponies, nursery rhymes and other books.

We thought the whole package from Bang On Books was great. The ordering and personalisation process is easy to do, the product looks great and is produced to a high standard. I would definitely recommend Bang On Books to any parents of keen young readers. This would be a great Christmas gift for any young fans of fairytales that would love to see themselves in their own story!

Unicorn Oo and the other stories from Bang On Books are available via their website, bangonbooks.co.uk.

Disclaimer: This review was done in return for the product. No financial agreements were entered into. Our opinions remain our own. This post contains affiliate links.

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