A poorly designed and sometimes overly abstract introduction to NASCAR for the very young.
“A is for automobile. NASCAR Sprint Cup Series cars are very cool automobiles.” The text progresses through the rest of the alphabet in a similar fashion. Each highly saturated page features a bold upper- and lowercase letter at the top, a photo of the object in the middle and a caption below. Some of the photos are eye-catching, such as those of the cars, a blimp and a checkered flag, but most are so heavily cropped that they lose context. The picture of the engine floats isolated on the page, and the image of the oval track is small and strangely warped. A few of the choices are far too confusing for toddlers to grasp, such as “qualify” for the letter Q. Others in the series use the same format and also have issues of clarity. In NASCAR Colors some of the photos of cars and uniformed drivers only hint at the hue in question. NASCAR Shapes pairs a simple image of a shape with a NASCAR photo and is a little more successful, but the trapezoid windshield looks quite odd detached from a car. NASCAR 123 takes readers up to 12, but again, the isolated images surrounded by white outlines will only mystify.
With the popularity of NASCAR and the love many toddlers express for vehicles, it is a shame these books could not cross the finish line. (Board book. 2-4)
