“The Alphabet Keeper” is the story of an alphabet that has been held captive–caged and in the dark–by a mean alphabet keeper. The letters make a brave escape through an open window one day while she’s cleaning the cage. Though the alphabet keeper tries over and over to catch them, the letters outwit her by doing things like turning her plans into plants and her hedges into edges. They eventually fly to the moon (by turning a rock into a rocket and a moo into a moon), “and the alphabet keeper will never get them back.”
The alphabet keeper herself has a “Persepolis” like quality: black hair, big eyes, strong eyebrows, and a matronly knot on the top of her head. She’s a convincing captor who gets the dark ending that she deserves. In contrast, the letters are mischievous and sprightly, their counters filled with eyeballs and their stems notched with grins. They whiz and fly about with visible joy.
The word play aspect of the book is completely over Zadie’s head, but she really likes pointing out all the letters and is starting to catch on to the idea that each letter has it’s own sound. I can imagine this book being fun as a kid is learning to read and maybe even more fun once she’s ready for word games.
As a former geologist I’m overly sensitive to intimations that dinosaurs and people overlapped. I have this fear that when kids read books featuring children who find a newly hatched dinosaur or dinosaurs who give their human parents goodnight kisses, they’ll start buying into the idea that the dinosaurs went extinct because humans didn’t invite them onto the Ark. The fact that no person has ever seen a living dinosaur means that any books featuring the two species have to somehow convey a sense of fantasy, which can be tricky when you’re writing for toddlers.
We’re reading in themes these days, or at least in two themes: zoos and dinosaurs. We lucked out again on the zoo front by finding “A Zoo for Mister Muster” at the library last week. “A Zoo for Mister Muster” was published almost 40 years ago. I don’t remember reading this one as a kid, but I read a lot of books that had a similar feel. The peachy tones overlain by sketchy black lines are like the words to nursery rhymes: You might have forgotten them after the 6th grade, but they come back in a flood of familiarity as soon as you’re re-exposed to them with your child. When I read this one to Zadie, I kind of feel like I’m sharing a bit of my childhood with her.
Zadie started demanding “more zoo books” when we got home from a day at San Francisco Zoo last weekend. After we read the two zoo books we had at home (“Goodnight Gorilla” and “Put Me in the Zoo”) about a dozen times, we headed to the library for more. As anyone who has visited a library with a toddler in tow knows, trying to find a book about a specific topic can be like trying to sing one song while listening to another through headphones. So I was especially pleased that the one zoo book I managed to find during our visit was a wonderful one.
It’s a funny thing, watching a kid reconcile the images of animals she has only seen in books with the real things at the zoo. A monkey in a book incites squeals of joy and cries of “swing! ape! greela!” But real life gorillas, even ones with tiny little babies in tow, were of no interest. Watching a grizzly bear catching and eating a live fish? Ho hum at the time, but a story we tell over and over again now, partly because the grizzlies in “Welcome to the Zoo” are also eating fish. And thanks to the zoo visit she now realizes that animals eat real fish, not goldfish crackers. Perhaps some 
There are a lot of Zadie’s books that I love, but few that I find myself relating to as an adult. Yes, “
This book is currently on Zadie’s list of haunted items in our house. We’ve witnessed the posession of toys before, but this is the first time it has happened to a book. I usually have no idea why a once-beloved object (a benign plastic boat, a green monkey, a flashcard with a baboon on it…) becomes taboo. In the case of “Boo Hoo Bird” I have a guess.
During the one year I spent living in San Diego, the lack of winter didn’t bother me, but the lack of rain was really unsettling. As an east coaster, I’d never realized how much I relied on rainy days as an excuse to do quiet things inside and work through blue thoughts. Rather than being a shining respite from the dreary grey springs of Cape Cod, the perpetual sunshine in Southern California seemed an affront to my occasional need to wallow. Wong Herbert Lee’s “Who Likes Rain?” captures the range of feelings we, and other creatures, experience on rainy days–from boredom to contemplation and elation.
Sometimes it seems like half of our home library–or Zadie’s portion of it anyway–consists of books featuring a different animal for each letter of the alphabet. How many animal alphabet books could one possibly need? Yes, A is for alligator, but it’s also for allspice, allen wrench, and almonds, three things I hope Zadie encounters more frequently than alligators. “Miss Bindergarten Celebrates the 100th Day of Kindergarten” is an animal alphabet book, but it’s more complex and engaging than most in this category.
