Elisha Cooper's (Homer; Train) favorite number is eight. To celebrate, he collects animals that begin with each letter of the alphabet, A to Z, one letter per page. And on each page, he selects one creature to appear eight times.
Each letter appears in both upper and lower case in classic Century Gothic typeface. Children just learning their ABCs will take pleasure in finding, on the first page, the aardvark, abalone, albatross, alligator, alpaca, ant (eight of them), anteater (watch out or there'll be seven!), antelope and armadillo. Adults, do not fret if you know not what an abalone looks like: Cooper supplies a legend at the back with a picture and a key fact about each creature (e.g., "Abalone eat algae"). The author-artist mixes familiar and lesser-known animals (such as gerbil and gibbon), and sometimes an adult and offspring complete the eight. Do you know what a xerus is? It is the only animal that appears eight times, by itself, on a page (though urchin dominates the "U" page, alongside uakari, umbrella bird and upupa). Cooper occasionally throws in a red herring--make that a trout, among the eight tuna for "T," and the eight lions on the "L" page appear as the king of the forest as well as several lionesses and some cubs. The compositions on each page allow children to distinguish easily between the different animals featured.
Youngsters will want to return to these pages over and over again. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness