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
Only for dedicated fans of the series.
When a kid gets the part of the ninja master in the school play, it finally seems to be the right time to tackle the closet monster.
“I spot my monster right away. / He’s practicing his ROAR. / He almost scares me half to death, / but I won’t be scared anymore!” The monster is a large, fluffy poison-green beast with blue hands and feet and face and a fluffy blue-and-green–striped tail. The kid employs a “bag of tricks” to try to catch the monster: in it are a giant wind-up shark, two cans of silly string, and an elaborate cage-and-robot trap. This last works, but with an unexpected result: the monster looks sad. Turns out he was only scaring the boy to wake him up so they could be friends. The monster greets the boy in the usual monster way: he “rips a massive FART!!” that smells like strawberries and lime, and then they go to the monster’s house to meet his parents and play. The final two spreads show the duo getting ready for bed, which is a rather anticlimactic end to what has otherwise been a rambunctious tale. Elkerton’s bright illustrations have a TV-cartoon aesthetic, and his playful beast is never scary. The narrator is depicted with black eyes and hair and pale skin. Wallace’s limping verses are uninspired at best, and the scansion and meter are frequently off.
Only for dedicated fans of the series. (Picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4926-4894-9
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks Jabberwocky
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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
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