Gyo Fujikawa's A to Z Picture Book

Gyo Fujikawa's A to Z Picture Book is amazing and gorgeous. When I picked it up in the bookstore and flipped through it, I was just in awe. I expected to find a $25 price tag on the back, but lo and behold, it costs $9.95. I could not believe it! This is a steal, and it is totally worth buying in hardback and new at that price. (The book is recently back in print after the 1970s version went out of print, and I don't know how the original compares.)

I only bought this book about six months ago, but I imagine that it would be a great one for infants and toddlers. It doubles as a vocabulary book, with numerous labeled illustrations of individual things on each letter's page. A young child would be interested in the book for language learning years before the alphabet has any meaning.

The downside to this approach to the alphabet is that there is no "story" or rhyme to read through, and there is a lot to look at on each page. Charlie enjoys looking at it for a little bit, but we will just do a page or two before he loses interest. That's fine with me, but I just have to make sure to start at a different page each time.

Legible Capital and Lowercase: A. The capital letter is shown in a very large font at the top left of each page, and the lowercase at the bottom right (a few pages mix it up and use top-right/bottom-left). The illustrations do interact with the letters, which has the potential to be a little bit confusing, but I don't find that they detract from the legibility.

Filler Words: A. A few comments about the format of this book are necessary at this point. Most letters get a full two-page black and white spread, with the large capital and lowercase and a bunch of things that start with that letter illustrated and labeled. Some of the less popular letters share a two-page spread, for example E on the left page and F on the right. Interspersed with these are two-page color spreads, but when two letters share a black and white page, only one of those letters gets a color page (E, G, I, K, O, Q, U, V, X, and Z do not have color pages). All of the black and white pages use the same format, but the color pages vary widely. A is contemplative: "A is for alone, / all by myself . . . / Hi, there, frog! / Can I play with you?" The illustration shows mostly sky and empty swamp, with just a lone girl standing, looking at frog on a rock. B is an entirely different experience: "B is for busy babies!" is the sole text, and the illustration shows literally dozens of babies and toddlers engaged in all manner of activities, interspersed with animals--and there are no labels. An infant or young toddler could spend easily 20 minutes with a parent pointing out all the things and activities on this page.

So, the black and white pages have little opportunity for filler words, since they are just labeled illustrations. Even so, there are some. One picture on the C page is labeled "Clara is crawling;" another is "Cat and copycat." The color pages do use filler words, but they are so carefully chosen and poetic (not in a rhyming way, but in an evocative way) that I have trouble thinking of them as "filler." Other color pages have hardly any words, or are highly alliterative ("F is for friends, fairies, flowers, fish, and frogs.")

Cheat Words: A-. In general, the author was extremely creative in coming up with words for unusual letters (zinnia, zero, zombie, zipper, zebra, and zoom!). She does sometimes use different starting sounds for a letter, but all of them very normal alternate sounds (under vs. unicorn). I'm not a fan of the X page, however (x-ray, X marks the spot, XXXXXX is for kisses, X is for railroad crossing, xeranthemum, xylophone).

Understandable Words: A. Okay, some of them are weird (didn't I just mention xeranthemum?), but they are all understandable. The xeranthemum is clearly illustrated and labeled, and even though I'd never heard the word before, I'm quite certain now that it's that kind of flower pictured right there. Unusual flower, bird, and animal names make lots of appearances, but I think that's fine because they are very concrete. A lot of abstract words are mixed in, but they are ones that a child can easily grasp, like "pout" and "hungry" and "crybaby."

Sounding Out: B. There are plenty of good sounding-out words here (eggs, fox, fish, lark, milk), but the font is pretty small for a little kid and it would be hard to focus that well. These words are mixed in with a lot that are not phonetic.

Hidden Pictures: (none). There is plenty of detail to notice in many of the color spreads, but there is no particular emphasis on including things that start with the same letter.

Illustrations: A. I did not recognize the name Gyo Fujikawa, but apparently she was a celebrated children's author and illustrator from the late 1950s through 1990. You will immediately recognize the illustration style when you pick up the book. My immediate thought was that this looked like a sappy-sweet 1950s gender-stereotypical morality-play type of illustration. But as soon as you start looking at what is actually there, you will discover amazing talent and depth in the illustrations. Faces are expressive in innumerable ways. Contrasts in subject matter leap off the page. Composition is just gorgeous. Reality and fantasy are equally well portrayed. It's a gem.

Theme (none).

You should buy this one. It's a bargain at twice the price.

The Alphabet from A to Y with Bonus Letter Z

I desperately wanted to like The Alphabet from A to Y With Bonus Letter Z!. Partially because it's co-written by Steve Martin (yes! the actor!), partially because the title is so fun and hilarious, and partly because the inside cover has a series of great cartoons in which non-English letters like ash, thorn, and a-circumflex complain about not being included in the book. Tragically, however, the book is terrible as an alphabet book.

Legible Capital and Lowercase: F.  Each page features a very large capital letter. There is no lowercase version featured. This would be fine, except that they use a highly embellished font for the large letters, so some of them are completely unrecognizable to a child just learning the alphabet. You can see what I mean by going to Amazon's look-inside feature and scrolling down to the A page. The A has a long flag flying off to the left from the top, and the left leg of it curls into a spiral. I pointed to it and asked Charlie what letter it was, and he said, "I don't know that one." FAIL. A few of the letters are normal-looking, but with this font, Charlie had trouble identifying A, E, F, G (honestly, I had a little trouble with this one!), M, N, Q, U, and W (this one, too! it looks like an X with wings!).

Filler Words: D. There are a lot of them, and the authors seem to be intentionally putting confusing sounds together. More on this under the Cheat Words section, because in this case, they kind of go together.

Cheat Words: D. This book goes out of its way to play with unusual starting sounds. That can be fun for grown-ups, but it's just plain confusing for children. The N page, for example, is an extended play on words that start with "kn." It reads, "Needle-nosed Nigel won nine kinds of knockwurst / By winning a contest to see who could knock worst." The W page uses "weally" instead of "really" to be cute, but try reading that to a child who has trouble saying the difference. The X page not only puts X's in the middle of words, but also intersperses them with ct and ck making the same sound: "Ambidextrous Alex was actually axed / For waxing, then faxing, his boss's new slacks." They also sometimes, randomly, use foreign words.

Understandable Words: C. This book is probably written for an older audience. It has a lot of gross-out jokes going on, and the vocabulary can be pretty abstract and/or obscure at times. Words include clingy, clueless, dapper, derby, frijoles, gravlax, heaven, and hunchbacks.

Sounding Out: B. The sentences have a mix of long and short words, some phonetic and some not. If you're intent on sounding something out, you'll find opportunities for it here.

Hidden Pictures: A. This is one area where the book shines. Each letter has a full-page illustration filled with things that start with the letter. The A page, for example, shows a scene of three women eating sandwiches in a living room. Checking out all the details in the picture, you can find aces (from a deck of cards), aardvark, angel, acorn, a tube of "Acne Away," alligator, abacus, apple, axe, and books labeled "Art of Antarctica," "All About Algebra," "Asparagus Acres," "Aaron's Appendicitis Almanac," and more.

Illustrations: B+. The pictures are cartoon style and kind of ugly, but full of the rich detail described above. They also show the characters and activities listed in the sentence for each letter.

Theme: (none).

Wow. Overall, this is one of the worst reviews I've ever written. The book does have a couple of redeeming features, mostly the illustrations. Some of its humor is good, but other jokes are very potty-oriented and gross-out, so I wouldn't recommend reading it just for the adult humor value. But the main problem here is that this is not a book designed to teach the alphabet to kids. It certainly does not accomplish that very well at all.

The Teddy Bear ABC (DK Publishing)

So many good books are out of print. I picked up The Teddy Bear ABC at a garage sale, and fortunately there are dozens of copies available on Amazon for very cheap. Finally, here is an alphabet book that Charlie and I can agree on. We both love it!

The gimmick with this book is that every letter has a different teddy bear with a name starting with that letter. This is kind of neat because the bears are cute, and because it introduces names as well as ordinary words that start with the letter. Of course, a lot of alphabet books do that just by using sentences, but this is another way to do it. Weirdly, there are two pages that combine letters and only give bear names, with no other words, for those letters. "I is for Ivan, J is for Jerry, K is for koala, kangaroo, and Kerry," and "X is for Xavier, Y is for Yo, Z is for zipper, Zack, and zero."

Legible Capital and Lowercase: A. The capital and lowercase letters are at the top left of each page, in a large, clear font, in bright colors. Very easy to see and recognize.

Filler Words: A. This book doesn't present sentences, it just gives three items starting with each letter and puts them in a sentence of the form, "A is for apple, ants, and Adelle, B is for Bruno, butterfly, and bell." The last words given for the two letters in the spread always rhyme, which is a nice touch and makes the text flow very well. The down side of this presentation method is that all of the words are nouns and names, with no other parts of speech mixed in.

Cheat Words: A-. Most of the words are fine, but they do inexplicably use Phil as a P name. They skip out on words for X and only present the name Xavier, which doesn't use the standard X sound.. Everything else is fine.

Understandable Words: A+. All of the words in this book are understandable, relevant to kids, easily illustrated, and actually illustrated. The sentences run across the tops of the pages. The bottom 2/3 of each page has photographs of the items, each labeled with its name.

Sounding Out: B. Some words are puzzlers (crumb, feather, Hugh), but there is at least one word that can be sounded out on each page.

Hidden Pictures: B. At the top of each page, there is a drawing of a cartoon teddy bear. On almost every page, the bear is doing or holding one thing that starts with the featured letter. For example, on the C page, the bear is taking a picture with a camera. However, when two letters share a page (I & J, X & Y), only one of the letters has a hidden picture, and on some pages, the hidden picture is the same as one of the things mentioned in the text. Some books have a lot more, and more clever, hidden pictures, so I'm giving this one just a B.

Illustrations: A. I love, love, love all of the DK books for their amazingly beautiful photography. This is actually one of the least impressive of the series, but it is still gorgeous. Everything is realistic and colorful and expertly placed on the page. This book also works well as a vocabulary-builder for infants and young toddlers.

Theme: A-. The theme of this book is teddy bears. Each letter's page has a photograph of a different teddy bear, and that bear is given a name starting with the letter. It's pretty interesting to see how much variation there can be among instances of a simple toy like a teddy bear. Additionally, cartoon bears appear at the tops of the pages, as mentioned above.

So, high marks in general here. I certainly recommend this book, especially for younger children and anyone who loves teddy bears.

Basher: ABC Kids

Basher: ABC Kids is a book that I love in theory, but in practice it has trouble holding Charlie's attention. He'll be interested for a few pages, maybe even half of the book, but then he'll wander off to do something else. I haven't figured out why. It's not too long, just a sentence for each letter. The illustrations are funny and attractive, with vibrant colors. Maybe the words are a bit too complex, or he's put off by the lack of rhymes. But I want so much for him to like it.... It scores very high on most of my alphabet book criteria.

Legible Capital and Lowercase: A. This is a large book (8.5 x 11 pages) with little content, so everything inside is big and bold. The individual letters are showcased in huge font on the entire bottom half of the left-hand page, capital and lowercase. The bottom of the right-hand page shows the entire alphabet in small lowercase letters, with the featured letter for that page in bold with an underline. The font is not too fancy, though Charlie did have a bit of trouble identifying the Q because of a weird tail. Some of the illustrations show characters standing or sitting on top of the letters, which can be a little bit distracting but is also really cute.

Filler Words: A+. This book has zero filler words, even though it is written in sentences! I cannot emphasize enough how rare this is. They pull off this trick by being imaginative with verbs and by writing a lot in plurals so no a/an/the is needed. "Arthur's angry ant ate apples." "Brianna bounces beautiful bugs." "Claude's crafty cuckoo collects coins." All the way through "Zack zaps zeppelins!" It's brilliant.

Cheat Words: A. They've done an excellent job picking words that legitimately start with the letters and have the correct sound. X is the hardest, of course, and they've gone with "Xavier x-rays xylophones." Not perfect, but not terrible either. I'm happy to forgive this because they did such a great job on "Queenie questions quivering quails."

Understandable Words: C. This is certainly part of what loses Charlie's interest. The book gets pretty abstract at times with words like quivering, elegant, crafty, irritable, marvelous. He has to ask what they mean, and they're not easy for me to define, either. And they can't really be drawn in the illustrations.

Sounding Out: B. Each letter gets a two-page spread. The left side has the sentence at the top and the large letters at the bottom, with an illustration of the sentence. The right side has the full alphabet at the bottom and at the top, it repeats a single word from the sentence and shows a large illustration of just that one thing. These words are pretty good for sounding out. Apple, bug, cuckoo, dog. Not all the words in the book are phonetic, but the majority of these featured ones are.

Hidden Pictures: (none).

Illustrations: A. I love the visual style of this book. It manages to be vibrant while using pastels, somehow. The characters are manga-inspired, with round faces and horizontal lines for eyes. The sentences are cleverly illustrated, even if not all of the nuances of the words can come across to a child. It's very well done.

Theme: (none).

I didn't realize until I was writing this review that Basher books are a series. There seem to be a variety about science and math topics, mainly aimed at somewhat older kids. They have great reviews on Amazon, so maybe this author is better at appealing to older kids than to the 3-year-old set. Perhaps Charlie would appreciate this book more if he were older and had a more extensive vocabulary. I suspect that he'll be well beyond alphabet books by the time he understands what an elegant elephant is, but that will not be true of all children. I love this book so much that I hope the target market manages to find it.

Dr. Seuss's ABC

At the risk of sounding unprincipled, I'm going to admit that Dr. Seuss's ABC is one of our favorite alphabet books even though it scores pretty low on several of my pre-announced factors. I think the reason is mostly familiarity. I read this so many times as a child that my parents can still, decades later, recite most of it from memory. I acquired a copy when Charlie was very young and started reading it to him frequently. It grew on all of us.

I had originally planned to rank the factors on a 1-5 scale, but letter grades is just way more appropriate, don't you think?

Legible Capital and Lower-Case: B. The book has a big capital letter on each page, and features a lowercase sample by itself on almost every page (not on O, P, and X for some reason). The lowercase letter is in the ordinary font size, though. The letters are included in the lines of text rather than set off by themselves. Still, it's pretty effective, and Charlie will point them out, often without prompting.

Filler Words: B. I'm not counting sentences like "What begins with B?" as filler, because they introduce the letter. This book is very mixed about filler words. Some pages have almost none: "Big B, little b, What begins with B? Barber baby bubbles and a bumblebee." Others have more, but they're used to pretty good effect: "O is very useful. You use it when you say: 'Oscar's only ostrich oiled an orange owl today." The only one that makes my skin crawl is the use of an N on the M page: "Big M, little m. Many mumbling mice are making midnight music in the moonlight . . . mighty nice." You might actually call that two N's and an L, as lots of kids will parse mid-night and moon-light as separate words.

Cheat Words: D. Duck-dog. Fiffer-feffer-feff. Googoo. Kerchoo. Lola Lopp. Quacker-oo. Tuttle-tuttle. Uncle Ubb.  Zizzer-Zazzer-Zuzz. It's Dr. Seuss. He makes up words. You're going to have to live with it. I do want to point out that there are a bunch of a different kind of cheat words for X, that he uses to great effect: NiXie KnoX, aX, eXtra, foX.

Understandable Words: A. This is one place where the book really shines. Dr. Seuss did an excellent job of picking out words that are recognizable and relevant to kids. Sometimes he chooses exotic animals like a Yak, but these are easy to explain and terrific for imagining. All of the words he chooses are easily illustrated, not abstract, even the verbs.

Sounding Out: C. I just don't think he paid much attention to this aspect. Some of the words are easy to sound out, others not. I believe he was writing for a company that was really into "sight words" instead of phonics. That doesn't spoil the book at all, it's just not a bonus. Anyway, by the time Charlie got interested in figuring out the other letters in a word, he'd already memorized this book.

Hidden Pictures: (none). I'm not scoring this factor in books that don't have hidden pictures, because it's optional. The illustrations here show just what's in the text, and that's that.

Illustrations: B. First the good. Every single word beginning with the featured letter is illustrated on the page, nouns, verbs, and adjectives alike. You can point to them while you're reading. One of my favorites is the letter P, which reads, "Painting pink pajamas. Policeman in a pail. Peter Pepper's puppy. And now Papa's in the pail." A completely bizarre set of things and activities, but each one is clearly drawn. The reason it's a B instead of an A is that I'm just not a huge fan of the Dr. Seuss illustration style.

Theme: (none). Also optional. No theme here, unless you count Dr. Seuss as a theme.

One unusual and very nice feature of this book is that it stops three times to review "the alphabet up until now." You read A through F, and then the G page begins with "ABCDEFG." And it fits the rhyme scheme, too! The entire alphabet-so-far is reviewed again at P and just before Z. Charlie loves this, and gets so excited to read along or sing the alphabet song at these points. I always let him say the last letter himself, and as a young toddler he was always so proud of choosing the right letter to come next. I think this is a huge part of the appeal of this book.

As an added bonus, here's Charlie at 15 months "helping" me sing the alphabet song. It's hard to believe he was ever this little!

Overall, this is a pretty good alphabet book that can draw you in with rhyme and accessibility. There are definitely some negatives. It's not my theoretical favorite, but in practice we read it over and over again. Charlie will often pull it off the shelf again after I "rotate" the active books and try to hide it, so it must be doing something right. I'll call this a moderate recommend, despite the cheat words.

Alphabet Books

I've been thinking a lot about alphabet books lately as Charlie has learned the name and sound of each letter. There are so many alphabet books on the market, and they range from fantastic to terrible, like all other books. I did a sweep of our bookshelves just now and found 18 different alphabet books, believe it or not. And that's not counting the Russian ones.

Alphabet books have their own factors to consider in addition to the things that I think about when selecting other types of books. In this post, I'm going to discuss the major factors to look for in alphabet books. Then, over the next several days, I'll review some of my favorite (and least-favorite) alphabet books and talk about how they stack up on these factors.

Legible Capital and Lowercase: Ideally, an alphabet book should have a large-print, clearly legible sample of the capital and lowercase letters by themselves. I do think it's okay for any particular book to feature just capitals or just lowercase, but it's better to show both. Overall, make sure your child is exposed to both capitals and lowercase letters. Montessori introduces lowercase letters first, because most of the letters you encounter in everyday reading are lowercase. Good theory, but too limiting in practice with all the awesome books out there that use capitals. I think kids are smart enough to catch on to seeing both at once.

Filler Words: Some alphabet books just showcase one or more individual words for each letter. Others are written in sentences. Both ways are great, but with sentences, you should watch to make sure there aren't too many filler words that start with different letters to complete the sentence. Even more important, you should check that the filler words are not made especially confusing by starting with words that look or sound similar (M on the N page, D on the B page, F on the V page).

Cheat Words: There are three types of words that I consider cheating in an alphabet book. The first type are simply made-up words -- things that have the right sounds but are not real words (e.g. Zeep). The second type are words that have the featured letter in them but don't start with that letter (e.g. fox to illustrate X). The third type are words that do start with the letter, but the letter is pronounced in an unusual way (e.g. chicken to illustrate C). These are most commonly found on the unusual letters, so check those pages carefully: Q, X, Y, Z. Some of these can be used effectively, but usually they're not.

Understandable Words: No child is going to be thrilled with an alphabet book full of words he doesn't know and has no need for. A is for Apple and Ambulance and Angry, not for Amphitheater and Algae.

Sounding Out: You're reading an alphabet book because your kid is starting to learn how to read. Once he catches on to the initial letters, you're going to want to extend the book by pointing out the other letters in each word. It gets really frustrating really fast if the words are long and complicated and have unusual pronunciations in them. On the other hand, a book full of three-letter phonetic words is really boring. This is a delicate balance.

Hidden Pictures: Many alphabet books have detailed illustrations that have many objects starting with the featured letter hiding on each page. They aren't mentioned in the text, but you can look and look and keep finding more things that start with A on the A pages, and so on through the book. I love these! They grow with the child.

Illustrations: Just like any book, the illustrations matter. They're what draw the child in, and they help alleviate the adult's boredom at going through the book a million times. Additionally, in an alphabet book, the illustrations should clearly show the words in the text. It helps the child figure out what they're reading, as they begin to do it themselves.

Theme: Alphabet books usually don't have any story to them, but some have a theme. Some themes are obvious (e.g. Texas ABC's!) and others are more subtle. Having a theme is not at all necessary, but it can be fun.

Those are the basics. Starting tomorrow, I'll review some of those 18 alphabet books that are now sitting in a stack on my desk.