Alpha-BEST! A sure-fire winner and a B-U-T of a book.
The alphabet comes out to play!
This delightfully entertaining alphabet book stands out in a very crowded field. The letters look like themselves, naturally, but they’re also shown to closely resemble others in their abecedarian family—with slight tweaks. Charming opening and closing poems explain that letters are all interrelated, just as members of the human family are. As in many an alphabet book, the letters are ordered sequentially. They’re announced in Harris’ marvelous, rollicking rhyming pairs that read and scan beautifully. Each actual letter is named and depicted straightforwardly but is then identified, verbally and pictorially, on the same page as the letter that it genuinely is in different, fanciful circumstances. For example, “An A is an H that just won’t stand up right. / A B is a D with its belt on too tight.” In the first instance, H’s usually erect left upright collapses against the right one in sweltering desert heat, forming A; a tight belt tightly cinches D’s waist, forming B. Santat’s colorful, riotous alpha-illustrations imbue pages or spreads with comical visual details, such as verbal and/or visual puns and/or commentary from the letters. Humans are depicted as racially diverse. Children will love creating similar poems and illustrations. Endpaper artwork features lined paper familiar from primary schools, with numbered arrows demonstrating the directions of the strokes needed to form alphabet letters. Readers are challenged to decode a clever secret message on the rear endpaper.
Alpha-BEST! A sure-fire winner and a B-U-T of a book. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-26662-8
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Not enough tricks to make this a treat.
Another holiday title (How To Catch the Easter Bunny by Adam Wallace, illustrated by Elkerton, 2017) sticks to the popular series’ formula.
Rhyming four-line verses describe seven intrepid trick-or-treaters’ efforts to capture the witch haunting their Halloween. Rhyming roadblocks with toolbox is an acceptable stretch, but too often too many words or syllables in the lines throw off the cadence. Children familiar with earlier titles will recognize the traps set by the costume-clad kids—a pulley and box snare, a “Tunnel of Tricks.” Eventually they accept her invitation to “floss, bump, and boogie,” concluding “the dance party had hit the finale at last, / each dancing monster started to cheer! / There’s no doubt about it, we have to admit: / This witch threw the party of the year!” The kids are diverse, and their costumes are fanciful rather than scary—a unicorn, a dragon, a scarecrow, a red-haired child in a lab coat and bow tie, a wizard, and two space creatures. The monsters, goblins, ghosts, and jack-o'-lanterns, backgrounded by a turquoise and purple night sky, are sufficiently eerie. Still, there isn’t enough originality here to entice any but the most ardent fans of Halloween or the series. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Not enough tricks to make this a treat. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-72821-035-3
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks Wonderland
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A sweet, soft conversation starter and a charming gift.
A paean to teachers and their surrogates everywhere.
This gentle ode to a teacher’s skill at inspiring, encouraging, and being a role model is spoken, presumably, from a child’s viewpoint. However, the voice could equally be that of an adult, because who can’t look back upon teachers or other early mentors who gave of themselves and offered their pupils so much? Indeed, some of the self-aware, self-assured expressions herein seem perhaps more realistic as uttered from one who’s already grown. Alternatively, readers won’t fail to note that this small book, illustrated with gentle soy-ink drawings and featuring an adult-child bear duo engaged in various sedentary and lively pursuits, could just as easily be about human parent- (or grandparent-) child pairs: some of the softly colored illustrations depict scenarios that are more likely to occur within a home and/or other family-oriented setting. Makes sense: aren’t parents and other close family members children’s first teachers? This duality suggests that the book might be best shared one-on-one between a nostalgic adult and a child who’s developed some self-confidence, having learned a thing or two from a parent, grandparent, older relative, or classroom instructor.
A sweet, soft conversation starter and a charming gift. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: March 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-943200-08-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Compendium
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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