A thoughtful alphabet book that succeeds in making letter learning feel like an adventure worth taking.
In this alphabet book, a derailed train’s off-course journey creates delightful chaos.
Traveling from A to Z, the vehicle goes spectacularly off the rails, jumbling the order of the ABCs in charming ways. Each letter receives focused attention as Mylie peppers his alliterative text with onomatopoeia—“DING DING! Delivery! Delicious dinner is served!”—that adds playful energy to the reading experience. His ink and watercolor illustrations have a wonderfully bustling, vintage quality that rewards careful examination. They evoke the spirit of the 1980s book series Sweet Pickles, in which a green pickle bus (rather than a train) and similar-looking friendly animal characters helped preschoolers (perhaps Mylie himself?) learn to love reading. The compositions burst with activity and detail, using varied perspectives and dynamic angles to create visual excitement. Warm, saturated colors fill the pages, resulting in an inviting atmosphere, while the strategic use of contrasting hues helps important elements pop from busy backgrounds. Sharp-eyed readers can hunt for both uppercase and lowercase letters cleverly hidden within each scene, plus objects that begin with the featured letter (a dog, a dragon, a dolphin, daffodils, and dice populate the D page). The journey to the Memory Palace provides a cohesive narrative framework that gives purpose to the alphabetical disorder, while the abundant visual details support multiple early-literacy skills, including phonological awareness, letter recognition, and vocabulary building.
A thoughtful alphabet book that succeeds in making letter learning feel like an adventure worth taking. (author’s note) (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781419768156
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
While this is a fairly bland treatment compared to Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ The Twelve Days of...
Rabe follows a young girl through her first 12 days of kindergarten in this book based on the familiar Christmas carol.
The typical firsts of school are here: riding the bus, making friends, sliding on the playground slide, counting, sorting shapes, laughing at lunch, painting, singing, reading, running, jumping rope, and going on a field trip. While the days are given ordinal numbers, the song skips the cardinal numbers in the verses, and the rhythm is sometimes off: “On the second day of kindergarten / I thought it was so cool / making lots of friends / and riding the bus to my school!” The narrator is a white brunette who wears either a tunic or a dress each day, making her pretty easy to differentiate from her classmates, a nice mix in terms of race; two students even sport glasses. The children in the ink, paint, and collage digital spreads show a variety of emotions, but most are happy to be at school, and the surroundings will be familiar to those who have made an orientation visit to their own schools.
While this is a fairly bland treatment compared to Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ The Twelve Days of Kindergarten (2003), it basically gets the job done. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: June 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234834-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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Not astonishingly go-out-and-buy-it-at-graduation inspirational, but all it takes is one seed of change to be planted.
Imagination soars—quite literally—when a little girl follows her own set of rules.
Every year Oak Hill School has a go-kart race called the Going Places contest. Students are given identical go-kart kits with a precise set of instructions. And of course, every single kart ends up exactly the same. Every one, that is, except Maya’s. Maya is a dreamy artist, and she would rather sketch birds in her backyard than get caught up in the competition. When she finally does start working, she uses the parts in the go-kart box but creates something completely different. No one ever said it had to be a go-kart. Maya’s creative thinking inspires Rafael, her neighbor (and the most enthusiastic Going Places contestant), to ask to team up. The instructions never say they couldn’t work together, either! An ode to creativity and individuality to be sure, but the Reynolds brothers are also taking a swipe at modern education: Endless repetition and following instructions without question create a culture of conformity. Hopefully now, readers will see infinite possibility every time the system hands them an identical go-kart box.
Not astonishingly go-out-and-buy-it-at-graduation inspirational, but all it takes is one seed of change to be planted. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: March 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4424-6608-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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