A menagerie of merry and meticulously embellished animals mingles with witty wordsmithing and a whimsical search-and-find component to create an extravagant abecedary for an extensive audience in Sylvie Daigneault's glorious, oversized picture book, The Imaginary Alphabet.
Twenty-six sophisticated scenes await attentive readers within this elaborate alphabet storybook. A brief phrase announces the primary animal, descriptor, and action, but readers can find in the paired illustration as many as 20 items beginning with the featured letter. "Agile Alligators Attempting an Arabesque" appear, dancing beneath an arch adorned with acorns upon which sit albatrosses. "Lazy Lemurs Licking Lemon Lollipops" sit atop a log by a lakeshore with a ladle at one's feet for their lemonade, as lilies grow nearby. The featured animals span an impressive array of size, skin, or fur texture, and varying degrees of likely familiarity to young readers. Descriptive vocabulary includes words like "clumsy," "orchestrating," and "velvety," striking a playfully erudite tone without veering into pretentiousness.
Daigneault (C Is for Canada: Celebrating Our Nation) crafts fantastical scenes with attention to the tiniest detail. Each letter of the alphabet gets its own page, and the frisky sentence setting each scene melds beautifully with the artwork's spirited aesthetic. The careful selection of animals and paired objects, all outside of their natural environs while feigning a convincing normalcy, is immersive. The author/illustrator uses layers of colored pencil, digitally enhanced, to achieve her attentive artwork, which feels elegant and spacious while sustaining a fanciful tone with childish appeal. This is a dreamy addition to personal shelves and library collections. --Kit Ballenger, youth librarian, Help Your Shelf