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
Fun times, fond friends, and a festive farmyard setting—little ones will be charmed.
Beep! Beep! Beep! Toad and Little Blue Truck get ready for a hayride.
After the titular vehicle is loaded with hay, Toad is nowhere to be found. “Beep! Beep! Beep! Where are you, Toad?” asks Little Blue Truck. All the barnyard animals look for him. Sheep searches the meadow. Goose and Duck check the pond. Others pitch in, too, but Toad seems to have disappeared…until Hen hears snoring coming from the pile of hay in the back of Little Blue Truck. Although the text’s scansion is imperfect in places (adults may want to pre-read to ensure a smooth read-aloud), the bouncy meter and rhyming text nevertheless capture the energy of the search and the farmyard community’s concern for Toad’s safety, making this a solid storytime choice. Eye-catching illustrations with rich, fully saturated colors balance the right level of detail while still highlighting the animal that is the focus of each verse. By introducing one farm animal at a time, Schertle also helps the youngest readers begin to identify barnyard animals by name and understand their unique farm homes. Traditional animal sounds are part of the text, and listeners will add them to their vocabulary. It all ends with the promised hayride, bringing the tale to a joyous ending.
Fun times, fond friends, and a festive farmyard setting—little ones will be charmed. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2026
ISBN: 9780063436121
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Clarion/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
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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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