The Sleepy Little Alphabet, by Judy Sierra, ill. Melissa Sweet
Alphabet books are a tricky beast – it’s hard to do something truly original while not going so far afield that you lose your audience. This means that even a cute book by a strong author can seem a little too close to a book that came before.
This book is such a book – I love a good bedtime book, and this one is fun, not to mention that Sierra is the author of a couple of seriously great books (Antarctic Antics is great for penguin-loving older kids, and Wild About Books is a fave of mine). Still, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, which is too big a book not to be known to nearly every reader. The alphabet here is animated into characters, as it is in Chicka Chicka, and the story told in a bouncy rhyme as well, though I will say this has always been a strength of Sierra’s.
This is not to say by any stretch that this is a knock-off. This book takes each of the 26 little (lower-case) letters and gives them individual character, parents in the upper case, and letter-appropriate toys, making for a host of sweet and amusing details that really bring the story to life. Sierra has picked her alphabetical adjectives well in most cases, and even gone for crowd-pleasers like “u takes off his underwear,” though her choice for notoriously difficult x (the acid test for alphabet books) is a touch strained, as x often is.
In short, I’m a little ambivalent here. On one hand, it’s cute, it’s fun, and it features a lower-case alphabet in nice clear font, while most books go for the capitals. On the other, if alphabet books have been big in your house, you may have a slight feeling of having been here before. Final verdict: don’t have many ABCs on your shelf yet, or need a small-letter version? This ably fills that niche.
A career Children’s Librarian, the Book Fairy (a.k.a. kittenpie) has worked in library systems in both New York and Toronto, and delights in sharing favourite books with kids of all ages. Since she can’t help but force books on people, she’s thrilled to have another place to do it without creeping people out the way she does at the bookstore.
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