Glorious, imaginative, beautiful, free-associating abcedary. Fun to look at, linger over, and laugh at. ( )

Beautiful illustrations with familiar animals and insects that start with the letter being presented. ( )

Kim Krans has illustrated an alphabet book that will engage everyone. The letters are surrounded by pen drawings with some color, all of things that begin with the letter on the page. Each letter featured beautiful black ink drawings with lots of detail. The level of detail takes this alphabet book into the category of seek and find.

This was a captivating read, especially for a book with no words. As I read I realized that there was more than the apparent objects being illustrated, but rather layers of unexpected things that also began with the same letter, for example the letter 'r' also showed a reflection that was really not obvious to me. A list at the end of the book showed me how tricky some of them were, I did not catch all of them!

This is a great ABC book with amazing artwork and a nice use of color. Each page features several objects that represent each letter. As I was reading it I thought they would make great posters for a classroom alphabet, I even contemplated buying a copy that I could cut up and post in my room. I think this would be a fun book to read aloud to younger students and then check to see if we figured out all of the things she put on each page, using the list at the back.

A visual book that reminds me of Chris Van Allsburg, "The mysteries of Harris Burdick", however, without any words at all. Each page is a letter and several images of words that begin with that letter. B, for example, has the illustrations of a butterfly, branch and braid, around the letter B that is filled in with a brick pattern. For younger children, it is an exercise in identifying all the images and naming them correctly with a word that begins with the letter of the page. I think this would be very interesting to use in classrooms as prompts for creative writing exercises. Perhaps the child could turn to the page that is the first letter in their name, and have to come up with a story that includes all the element from that page. More advanced students could include the letter of their first and last name or all the letters of their name.