The Alphabet's Alphabet

by Chris Harris, Dan Santat (Illustrator)

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

It’s high time someone shed light on the alphabet, and who better than two of the craftiest creators in the land, Chris Harris and Dan Santat? Storytime will never be the same once you realize that “B is a D with its belt on too tight” and other musings meant to tickle the brain and surprise your eyes. Put this in your parlor of punny poems alongside Harris' and Santat’s other masterpieces.

For fans of P is for Pterodactyl comes this groundbreaking spin on the ABCs from an acclaimed bestselling author and artist duo!


Here's a totally twisted take on the alphabet that invites readers to look at it in a whole new way: An A is an H that just won't stand up right, a B is a D with its belt on too tight, and a Z is an L in a tug-of-war fight! Twenty-six letters, unique from each other — and yet, every letter looks just like one another! Kind of like...one big family.


From two bestselling masters of wordplay and visual high jinks comes a mind-bending riddle of delightful doppelgängers and surprising disguises that reveal we're more alike than we may think. You'll never look at the alphabet the same way again!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316266604
Publisher:	Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Publication date:	09/29/2020
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
File size:	47 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

Chris Harris is the New York Times bestselling author of I'm Just No Good at Rhyming: And Other Nonsense for Mischievous Kids and Immature Grown-Ups, illustrated by Lane Smith; The Alphabet's Alphabet, illustrated by Dan Santat; and If You Laugh, I'm Starting This Book Over, illustrated by Serge Bloch. He currently serves as showrunner and executive producer for the new Frasier. Previous TV writing credits include How I Met Your Mother, Acapulco, and The Late Show with David Letterman. His pieces have appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and on NPR. He lives in Los Angeles.
 
Dan Santat is the Caldecott Medal-winning and New York Times bestselling author and illustrator of The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend, Are We There Yet?, After the Fall, as well as the illustrator including Drawn Together and Lift by Minh Lê, The Alphabet's Alphabet by Chris Harris, and Crankenstein by Samantha Berger. Dan lives in Southern California with his wife, two kids, and various pets. His website is dantat.com.

Editorial Reviews

07/20/2020

This alphabet comedy by Harris (I’m Just No Good at Rhyming) uncovers unexpected family resemblances between letters of the Latin alphabet: “For all of the letters—from A on through Z—/ Can look like each other in some way, to me.” “A G is a Q that has started to yawn/ An H is a U with a pair of stilts on.” In spreads with warm, dramatic lighting; sunny colors; and plenty of word balloon chatter, Santat (Lift) portrays the letters as physical bodies, bent and straight, portly and thin, and supplies domestic particulars: G’s bedroom has a heavy metal band poster on the wall (“AB/CD”) and a stuffed lower-case r to cuddle. The collaboration produces an amusing, imaginative excursion, and it prods readers—especially those new to reading and writing—to visualize similarities between the symbols. Harris’s versifying nails rhyme and meter, and Santat’s endless stream of energy (J slumps, sunburned in a deck chair, to become a U, having lost its sunglasses and knocked over its drink) delivers one over-the-top gag after another. Ages 4–8. Author’s agent: Richard Abate, 3 Arts Entertainment. Illustrator’s agent: Jodi Reamer, Writers House. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"The tongue-in-cheek rhyming text is engaging and will be appreciated by youngsters."—Booklist

"With over-the-top creativity, Santat's illustrations use a soft colored palette of secondary colors. For use in preschools or alphabet-themed story times, this funny and creative ABC book will delight children and adults alike."—School Library Journal

"Recommended for fans of wordplay and other pun-filled alphabet books such as Tom Lichtenheld's E-mergency!"—Horn Book

"The collaboration produces an amusing, imaginative excursion, and it prods readers — especially those new to reading and writing — to visualize similarities between the symbols. Harris's versifying nails rhyme and meter, and Santat's endless stream of energy delivers on over-the-top gag after another."—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

07/01/2020

PreS-Gr 1—The letters of the alphabet have more in common than meets the eye; in fact, they may be a family. An "A is an H that just won't stand up right, a B is a D with its belt on too tight, and a Z is an L in a tug-of-war fight." Harris (I'm Just No Good at Rhyming) offers an ingenious and humorous look at the alphabet in a hand-lettered text, where speech bubbles accompany the chatty letters. Children will engage with the rhyming text and have fun deciphering the images. With over-the-top creativity, Santat's illustrations use a soft colored palette of secondary colors. VERDICT For use in preschools or alphabet-themed story times, this funny and creative ABC book will delight children and adults alike.—Kathia Ibacache, Univ. of Colorado Boulder

School Library Journal

This audiobook makes the case that all 26 letters of the alphabet are related to one another—like family. Katie Schorr narrates the rhyming text in a gentle, happy tone. Listeners will hear the smile on her face. Her pacing is slow, allowing children time to create pictures in their minds, but preschoolers may find it difficult to visualize some images without benefit of the print version. For example, "a ‘C’ is a ‘G’ with its mustache shaved clean, a ‘D’ is an ‘R’ peeking over a screen." It’s all very clever—but difficult to quickly imagine. That being said, this audiobook would make an excellent art assignment. Listen and draw the alphabet as described. L.T. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2020 - AudioFile

This audiobook makes the case that all 26 letters of the alphabet are related to one another—like family. Katie Schorr narrates the rhyming text in a gentle, happy tone. Listeners will hear the smile on her face. Her pacing is slow, allowing children time to create pictures in their minds, but preschoolers may find it difficult to visualize some images without benefit of the print version. For example, "a ‘C’ is a ‘G’ with its mustache shaved clean, a ‘D’ is an ‘R’ peeking over a screen." It’s all very clever—but difficult to quickly imagine. That being said, this audiobook would make an excellent art assignment. Listen and draw the alphabet as described. L.T. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2020 - AudioFile

★ 2020-06-03
The alphabet comes out to play!

This delightfully entertaining alphabet book stands out in a very crowded field. The letters look like themselves, naturally, but they’re also shown to closely resemble others in their abecedarian family—with slight tweaks. Charming opening and closing poems explain that letters are all interrelated, just as members of the human family are. As in many an alphabet book, the letters are ordered sequentially. They’re announced in Harris’ marvelous, rollicking rhyming pairs that read and scan beautifully. Each actual letter is named and depicted straightforwardly but is then identified, verbally and pictorially, on the same page as the letter that it genuinely is in different, fanciful circumstances. For example, “An A is an H that just won’t stand up right. / A B is a D with its belt on too tight.” In the first instance, H’s usually erect left upright collapses against the right one in sweltering desert heat, forming A; a tight belt tightly cinches D’s waist, forming B. Santat’s colorful, riotous alpha-illustrations imbue pages or spreads with comical visual details, such as verbal and/or visual puns and/or commentary from the letters. Humans are depicted as racially diverse. Children will love creating similar poems and illustrations. Endpaper artwork features lined paper familiar from primary schools, with numbered arrows demonstrating the directions of the strokes needed to form alphabet letters. Readers are challenged to decode a clever secret message on the rear endpaper.

Alpha-BEST! A sure-fire winner and a B-U-T of a book. (Picture book. 4-8)

Kirkus Reviews