AFRICAN ANIMALS ABC
By
Newcomer Browne goes on an intrepid alphabet safari, with big and beautiful pictures of wild things in the wild woods, painted in a fauve palette. The two- to six-word descriptions--""Antbear naps,"" ""Bushbaby blinks,"" ""Crocodile snaps,"" ""Dassie drinks""--appear below ever-so-slightly stylized animals (amphibian, bird, mammal, or insect), each of which fills up the whole page. Around it is a bright and wildly colorful landscape, filled with pulsating brushstrokes and patterns and framed by a black outline. At the end of the book are paragraph-long notes on each animal with vital statistics. The union of animals and the alphabet is already a fundamentally happy one, but Browne makes them look made for each other.