Hundreds of tiny, subtly raised images to study and name make a lovely, tactile alphabet book that can be enjoyed far longer than most ABC books.
Each letter, formed by arranging several embossed pictures of related objects together in the shape of a large block capital, is presented with one line of text according to a simple formula. A creature is doing something with (or to) an item with the same initial letter. So, “Alligator admires an apple.” The alligator and apple are prominent in the letter design, but 33 other “A” items are also embedded in the capital A: accordion, artwork, alarm clock, Africa, anemone, etc. This device is repeated for each letter, with most letters occupying an entire page. D and E, H and I, M and N, and U and V share pages; the already-tiny embedded images are even smaller for those letters; there appears to be no logic to this forcing letters onto shared pages beyond, possibly, a budgetary one. Adding eight more pages would have made for a far more elegant book. All the letters are repeated on a double-page spread at the end of the book. The final six pages list all the objects included in each letter design.
While the tiny images will make this a challenge for young babies, the large number of objects to identify means they will return to it again and again as their vocabularies expand.
(Board book. 1-4)