David McPhail's Animals A to Z

by David McPhail

This fun and engaging ABC book is the kind where each page is full of things beginning with the featured letter. The main animal or two are named on the page, and the rest are left up to the reader to find and discover- sometimes as many as six or seven animals or objects. If you think you've missed one, there's a little list in the back. When I read the book with my baby, I just name the few most prominent animals or objects, but my older daughter likes to look for every single thing and count them all. My favorite is the page for T, which has a tiger on top of a turtle, holding a telephone. The hard letters and/or unusual animals? This book features a bird called xenops for X, and a unicorn and upside-down catfish for U. I thought at first that the fish was a cop-out, a catfish that just happened to be swimming upside-down. But no, this fish habitually swims upside-down, thus its name. Wonderful, what the books will teach you.

This book came into our house as a gift from my sister to the baby.

rating: 4/5 ........ 32 pages, 1993