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Lynn: “It was a quiet morning at preschool until Adelaide annoyed Bailey.”  An escalating alphabetic chain reaction follows right up to the drenching moment when Zelda zaps Adelaide.  Miss Mabel asks Adelaide to apologize and soon calm returns to the school as everyone settles in for story time.

Bottner’s delightfully droll disasters are cleverly captured by Michael Emberley’s illuminating illustrations, executed excellently in pencil and watercolors.  Each sequential scene is seriously sidesplitting.  Readers will love watching the merry mayhem multiply.  OK – sorry – the book seems to be infectious!  This little gem is a hoot, clever and funny and each illustration rewards repeat reading.  Oops – I’m doing it again.

Our focus group who consider themselves waaaay to old for alphabet books loved this one anyway and I think it is going to become a family favorite.  Ack – I can’t stop.  I’m handing this off to Cindy before I’m permanently alliterized!

Cindy: I’ll tell you what’s annoying…returning from a busy ALA conference, tired and jet-lagged, and waking up to find out that Lynn expects me to be creatively alliterative in this post. Both bloggers being bouncy is too much for me this morning. I think she is nattering nervously on Newbery fumes! :) And as I flip through this book’s precocious pages again, this book is sounding much like the annoying adolescents in my middle school who are in serious need of a snow day to regain their calm. Or maybe they just need a spray with a watering hose and then a story hour. Yeah, that’s the ticket!

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 26th, 2012 at 7:47 am and is filed under Alphabet Books, Humor, Picture Books, PreS-Gr. 2. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.