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|---|---|---|
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | EASY MAC | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
Welcome to England's Ministry of Letters, the place where all the words in the world--in books, magazines, newspapers, road signs, posters, and more--start their lives, and from which the letters coordinate their critical missions to help children learn the alphabet.
This book tells the story of Charlie Foxtrot, who starts school and finds mastering the alphabet confusing. The members of the Ministry's Special Alphabet Service set off on a mission to Scotland to help Charlie and to open his mind to the power of letters and words.
The charming artwork, reminiscent of classic children's book illustrations from the 1950s and 1960s, combines with the witty text to bring the characters of the alphabet to life.
Author Notes
Al MacCuish is a Creative Director at Mother, one of the world's leading creative agencies. He lives in London.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
MacCuish, a creative director at an ad agency, makes his children's book debut with a gleeful throwback of a story about the Ministry of Letters, based out of a red mailbox in "the shadow of Big Ben," where all the words in the world originate. When the ministry receives an urgent call about a boy, Charlie, who is hopelessly unprepared for an upcoming test on the alphabet, its operatives spring into action, their rescue effort involving a train, a predatory cat, and a duchess on a motorbike. Lozano's loosely rendered illustrations evoke a lively mid-20th-century London, one in which question marks on roller skates serve as switchboard operators and alphabet letters parachute into boys' bedrooms and perform stage shows to save the day. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books Review
THERE is no finer tradition in English-language education than transforming the letters of the alphabet into living, breathing objects of fun. Those of us who came of age in the 1970s and '80s may suppose that "Sesame Street" invented the concept - we might well be called Generation X because so many of us remember the letter X appearing in Muppet form on Guy Smiley's "Mystery Guest" game show. In fact, alphabetic anthropomorphism predates Jim Henson's furry crew by a couple of centuries. In "The Story of A," a fascinating look at "the alphabetization of America," Patricia Crain dates the presence of lively alphabet books for children to the 18th century: "From 1750 on," Grain writes, "the alphabet was dressed up and decked out, animated, ornamented, narrated, and consumed." Alphabet books and primers written expressly for children formed a new secular literary genre, often sold by peddlers to reach a mass audience, and designed to lure young readers into the joys of literacy. One of the earliest, "The Child's New Play-Thing," contains two highly animated alphabet rhymes: "A was an Archer" and "A Apple Pye" ("B bit it / C cut it / D divided it"). Each generation since has had its own personified alphabets. More recent touchstones include the raucous tree-climbing letters of "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom" and the insatiable E of "E Eats Everything," one of the droll music videos created for the album "Here Come the ABCs," by They Might Be Giants. The latest entries in this tradition find new ways to enliven A to Z. Tom Lichtenheld's "E-mergency!" imagines the letters sharing a house - the book has its origin in a short animated video, "Alphabet House" by Ezra Fields-Meyer, a remarkably creative -autistic 14-year-old. Lichtenheld came across the video on YouTube and was inspired to write and illustrate "E-mergency!" in Ezra's whimsical style. In Lichtenheld's telling, the alphabet enters crisis mode after the letter E suffers an accident on the stairs. All the others pitch in, with O enlisted to fill in so E can get better - make that "got bottor." Every page is chock-full of inventive letter-play, sometimes winking more to parent than child. (At one point, J looks in the mirror and asks, "Does this serif make my butt look big?") But the book quickly became a favorite of my alphabetically obsessed 5-year-old, who even enjoyed the endpaper illustration ranking the frequency of each letter's usage in the English language. "Operation Alphabet," written by Al MacCuish, similarly adorns letters with cartoonish faces and limbs, but this British import carries a whiff of Harry Potter by placing the alphabetic actors in the top-secret Ministry of Letters. When the little boy Charlie Foxtrot has trouble learning the alphabet at school, the ministry's Special Alphabet Service comes to save the day. Simply getting to Charlie's house is an adventure in itself, with the letters embarking on a perilous train ride in which a gallant duchess must rescue them from an alphabet-hungry cat. This book, too, will appeal as much to parents as to children, with Luciano Lozano's stylish illustrations recalling vintage graphic imagery of the '50s and '60s. What better way to have children identify with the alphabet than to make each letter stand for a child? In "An Annoying ABC," by Barbara Bottner, A to Z are represented by a classroom of rambunctious students from Adelaide to Zelda (with their teacher, Miss Mabel, as the central M, presiding over the chaos). Tiger-suited Adelaide annoys Bailey, and Bailey blames Clyde, setting into motion a domino effect of juvenile pandemonium that can be resolved only by returning to A, with apologies all around. All 26 characters are rendered by Michael Emberley with distinctive charm, using watercolor and pencil to move the action along fluidly from scene to scene. In "Max's Castle," by Kate Banks, the letters are simply letters, yet become ingenious tools for sparking a child's imagination. Young Max pulls out some old alphabet blocks from under his bed and decides to build a castle, despite initial skepticism from his older brothers, Benjamin and Karl. As with previous collaborations between Banks and the bold illustrator Boris Kulikov ("Max's Words," "Max's Dragon"), words become magical amulets that transmogrify the world around Max. Anything can happen in the castle Max constructs, simply by manipulation of the letters on the blocks. When the brothers spot pirates, in the form of a ship made from the letters P-I-R-A-T-E-S, Max defuses the situation by rearranging the blocks into RAT PIES. They are saved from a deadly ADDER with the addition of an L, which turns the snake into a LADDER and brings them to safety. Children who enjoy tinkering with words as Max does may end up in the realm of anagrams, palindromes, word squares and other ways of "making the alphabet dance," to quote the title of one wordplay anthology. Letters need not be mere vehicles for literacy, as these books demonstrate. They can be the very stuff of creativity, rooted in the age-old impulse to make the alphabet our plaything. Ben Zimmer, the former On Language columnist for The Times Magazine, is the executive producer of VisualThesaurus.com and Vocabulary.com.
