Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

This French import is a graphically amped alphabet pop-up in the vein of Robert Sabuda’s work. Some spreads are simple three-dimensional versions of the featured letter, but the best cleverly involve the reader in the letter’s creation (opening the page wider flips the C to a D; a transparent overlay with two chunky tails turns O and P to Q and R; positioning a mirror recto opposite the verso’s V results in a spread for W). As with most intricate pop-ups, it’s likely to fare poorly with serious hands-on library use, and as with most graphic alphabets, it’s less of an alphabet book than an art project, and it’s somewhat uneven as that. The imaginative emphasis on common aspects of adjacent letters, though, could offer some possibilities for creative language arts use as well as for art (perhaps in conjunction with Robb’s Ox, House, Stick: The History of Our Alphabet, BCCB 9/07), and any collection of dramatic pop-ups will want to include this suave traveler.