Booklist Online: More than 130,000 book reviews for librarians, book groups, and book lovers - from the trusted experts at the American Library Association

Cindy: I’ve been immersed in teen lit this year but being the klutz I am, I couldn’t help but notice the cover of E-mergency! (Chronicle 2011) with poor E slipping on a flight of stairs headed straight for O. Oh-no! The importance of the most frequently used letter E is made perfectly clear in this funny story [...]

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 [...]

Cindy: I collect rocks everywhere I travel (a habit from my grandmother) and I am partial to ones with holes in them, but this collection in If Rocks Could Sing: A Discovered Alphabet (Tricycle Press 2011) really ROCKS. Instead of collecting seashells on her Florida beaches, McGuirk slowly built an alphabet collection of rocks A-Z. [...]

Lynn: LMNO Peas (S&S/Beach Lane 2010) had me laughing before I even saw the book. Countless small children have sung this section of the alphabet song just this way, including my own sons and grandsons. I kept right on laughing when I read the book because the execution is just as much fun as the [...]

Lynn: Cindy saw a review of Lights On Broadway: A Theatrical Tour from A to Z (Blue Apple, 2009) and we got excited about it but somehow it dropped off our radar until we saw it in the booth at Midwinter and got excited all over again. This eye-catching high-voltage picture book defines theater terms [...]

Lynn: Our focus group is starting to throw their weight around. Ever since we read The Sleepy Little Alphabet (Random/Knopf, June 2009) in galley several months ago, they’ve been asking if we have written about it yet. Explaining that we like to blog books closer to the publication didn’t impress them. They adored this book [...]