School Library Journal Review
PreS-Gr 4-Here's an alphabet book that calls to mind Walter Wick's "I Spy" pictures crossed with characters from William Joyce's A Day with Wilbur Robinson (HarperCollins, 1990). Wonderfully retro-looking plastic toys are arranged and photographed in unlikely madcap tableaux in which nearly every object begins with the same letter. A compact caption appears below each full-page picture. In the eponymous scene about Ellsworth ("E"), a plastic man in a suit-complete with raincoat and briefcase-sprouts small light bulbs from his ears as elephants and an emu look on. It's a zany approach for pre-readers, who will recognize the initial sounds of most of the toy creatures and objects, as well as for older children, who will enjoy the imaginative juxtaposition of items. A list by letter at the back of the book will help readers identify picture parts they missed or aren't sure about. The full-page, full-color illustrations are fairly simply composed with only the foreground in focus, as if to capture a frame of a film or a scene in motion. Alphabet purists may quibble about misleading figures with different initial letters in some pictures (the pigs on the "F" page, the jar of cookies in the kangaroo's kitchen on the "K" page), but most children will recognize them as necessary parts of the wacky short tales depicted. Overall, an unusual and delightful book.-Kathie Meizner, Montgomery County Public Libraries, Chevy Chase, MD (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
This pleasingly eccentric alphabet book unfolds in a series of of sassy, splashy mixed-media dioramas. For each letter, Fisher (My Big Brother) crafts a stage set from small toys, miniatures, paper cut-outs and found objects, and she headlines each tableau with an alliterative statement. For example, she writes, "Alistair had an alarming appetite for acrobats," a line made all the funnier by the visual rendering. Alistair is an open-jawed (toy) alligator who almost seems to salivate as he looks at the paper-doll tightrope walker daintily crossing a string just above his head. The joy here is not just in Fisher's jokes, but also in her meticulously layered visual scenarios. Readers will want repeat viewings to discover all the alphabetically and thematically linked objects. "Betty believed in a big but balanced breakfast" finds Betty (a bear) at the beach, literally balancing a banana, a blueberry, bread and butter, a beet and more on her nose. Nearby stands a baseball player, a baby holding a balloon, and so on. In its approach and eye-popping execution, this book recalls the I Spy or Look-Alike titles, but with its goofy imagery (pigs in feathered tutus; Stanley the stegosaurus munching his way through the produce aisle at the supermarket; an invisible ice cream shop selling flavors like "vanishing vanilla"), it's not a direct descendant of those titles but a soon-to-be-cherished zany cousin. Ages 4-8. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
