A playful approach to teaching kids the alphabet.
Twenty-six Alphababies prepare for bedtime.
Putting A, B, C, and 23 other little ones to bed for the night is a daunting task. The bespectacled Alpha Mom needs a megaphone to call the kids to attention: “TIME FOR BED!” From there, in a style reminiscent of Bill Martin Jr. and John Archambault’s Chicka Chicka Boom Boom (1989), illustrated by Lois Ehlert, each child romps, rolls, and races to bed. Despite lights out, the kids have an “alpha pillow fight!” after which Mommy and Daddy finally get them to sleep with a kiss and one last tuck into bed. This spirited family is full of personality, each child with a different stuffed animal and pajama set and a unique journey to bedtime. The illustrations capture the bustle of a house bursting with children, from the chaos of the dinner table and children slipping on carpets and overturning houseplants in their haste to a series of bathtubs full of activity. A particularly effective string of illustrations shows the progression of lights out, from the line of light from a cracked bedroom door through the pillow fight and right into the appearance of two perturbed parents. The rhyming text bounces along, an easy read-aloud, with rich vocabulary like impish, jazzy, and scramble making for a fun, silly, relatable read with detailed, appealing illustrations. The Alphababies are diverse in skin tone, their mother is brown-skinned, and their father is light-skinned. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A playful approach to teaching kids the alphabet. (Picture book. 2-5)Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-399-16841-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Nancy Paulsen Books
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own...
The sturdy Little Blue Truck is back for his third adventure, this time delivering Christmas trees to his band of animal pals.
The truck is decked out for the season with a Christmas wreath that suggests a nose between headlights acting as eyeballs. Little Blue loads up with trees at Toad’s Trees, where five trees are marked with numbered tags. These five trees are counted and arithmetically manipulated in various ways throughout the rhyming story as they are dropped off one by one to Little Blue’s friends. The final tree is reserved for the truck’s own use at his garage home, where he is welcomed back by the tree salestoad in a neatly circular fashion. The last tree is already decorated, and Little Blue gets a surprise along with readers, as tiny lights embedded in the illustrations sparkle for a few seconds when the last page is turned. Though it’s a gimmick, it’s a pleasant surprise, and it fits with the retro atmosphere of the snowy country scenes. The short, rhyming text is accented with colored highlights, red for the animal sounds and bright green for the numerical words in the Christmas-tree countdown.
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own tree that will put a twinkle in a toddler’s eyes. (Picture book. 2-5)Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-544-32041-3
Page Count: 24
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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Plotless and pointless, the book clearly exists only because its celebrity author wrote it.
A succession of animal dads do their best to teach their young to say “Dada” in this picture-book vehicle for Fallon.
A grumpy bull says, “DADA!”; his calf moos back. A sad-looking ram insists, “DADA!”; his lamb baas back. A duck, a bee, a dog, a rabbit, a cat, a mouse, a donkey, a pig, a frog, a rooster, and a horse all fail similarly, spread by spread. A final two-spread sequence finds all of the animals arrayed across the pages, dads on the verso and children on the recto. All the text prior to this point has been either iterations of “Dada” or animal sounds in dialogue bubbles; here, narrative text states, “Now everybody get in line, let’s say it together one more time….” Upon the turn of the page, the animal dads gaze round-eyed as their young across the gutter all cry, “DADA!” (except the duckling, who says, “quack”). Ordóñez's illustrations have a bland, digital look, compositions hardly varying with the characters, although the pastel-colored backgrounds change. The punch line fails from a design standpoint, as the sudden, single-bubble chorus of “DADA” appears to be emanating from background features rather than the baby animals’ mouths (only some of which, on close inspection, appear to be open). It also fails to be funny.
Plotless and pointless, the book clearly exists only because its celebrity author wrote it. (Picture book. 3-5)Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-00934-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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