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Summary
Summary
Perfect for gift-giving, here isTHE alphabet book to top all others, an over-sized work of brilliance from the illustrator of the #1 New York Times bestselling The Day the Crayons Quit !
If words make up the stories and letters make up the words, then stories are made up of letters. In this menagerie we have stories made of words, made FOR all the letters.
The most inventive and irresistible book of the year spans a mere 26 letters (don't they all!) and 112 pages. From an A stronaut who's afraid of heights, to a B ridge that ends up burned between friends, to a C up stuck in a cupboard and longing for freedom, Once Upon an Alphabet is a creative tour de force from A through Z. Slyly funny in a way kids can't resist, and gorgeously illustrated in a way readers of all ages will pour over, this series of interconnected stories and characters explores the alphabet in a way that will forever raise the bar.
In Once Upon an Alphabet , #1 New York Times bestseller Oliver Jeffers has created a stunning collection of words and artwork that is a story book, alphabet book, and gorgeously designed art book all in one.
Praise for ONCE UPON AN ALPHABET:
An Amazon Best Book of 2014!
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year!
A School Library Journal Best Book of the Year!
A New York Times Bestseller!
* "The silly, spare, slightly surreal text occasionally rhymes and endlessly surprises. An utterly delightful alphabet book."- Kirkus Review , starred review
* "With wry humor, equally droll ink illustrations, and a solid dose of alliteration, Jeffers creates delightful mini-narratives for each letter of the alphabet."- Publishers Weekly , starred review
* "An altogether stimulating, surprising, and satisfying reading experience."- School Library Journal , starred review
* "Whimsical, funny, occasionally tragic, and highly entertaining, this collection of (sometimes) interlocking tales is brilliantly inventive."- Horn Book , starred review
"Jeffers knows how to catch the attention of his young audience while challenging their imagination, intellect and vocabulary. This whimsical exploration of letters and language begs to be read over and over again."- BookPage
"Handsome, humorous and clad in bright tomato-red, [this] is the sort of book you may want to rush into the arms of imaginative, good-natured children between 4 and 10 years old. [T]his is no traditional abecedarian exercise.The stories are wonderfully varied, sometimes philosophical and often end surprisingly; the drawings are just as quirky and unpredictable."- The Wall Street Journal
"[W]itty from A to Z . . . no one would blame you for having a copy even if there are no kids in the house. Think of it as Edward Gorey for the preschool set -- and their hip parents."- The Washington Post
Author Notes
Oliver Jeffers was born in Port Hedland, Western Australia in 1977. He grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He received a First Class Honors Degree in illustration and visual communication and certificate of foundation studies from the University of Ulster, School of Art and Design in 2001. His work has been exhibited in multiple cities, including the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Brooklyn Museum, and Gestalten Space in Berlin.
He writes and illustrates picture books. His debut book, How to Catch a Star, was published in 2004 and won a Merit Award at the CBI/Bisto Book of Year Awards. His second book, Lost and Found, won the Gold Award at Nestle Children's Book Prize and was developed into an animated short film, which has received over sixty awards including a BAFTA for Best Animated Short Film. His other books include The Incredible Book Eating Boy, The Great Paper Caper, Up and Down, Stuck, This Moose Belongs to Me, Once upon an Alphabet: Short Stories for All Letters, The Hueys series and A Child of Books. He has won numerous awards including the Smarties Award, Irish Book of the Year, The Blue Peter Book of the Year, and the 2017 Academy of British Cover Design Award in the Children's category.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 1-4-Jeffers's empathic nature, evident from his sympathetic renderings of Drew Daywalt's beleaguered crayons in The Day the Crayons Quit (Philomel, 2013), here extends to the hardworking letters. This eccentric and entertaining anthology is introduced by an eloquent syllogism about the relationship of letters, words, and stories. While each four-page tale showcases a (seemingly) hand-drawn capital and lowercase letter, and many of the words-and unnamed objects-begin with the corresponding letter, this is not your mother's abecedarium. It is a framework for Jeffers's intriguing worldview, combining ludicrous juxtapositions and situations and a great capacity for gentleness. Some passages are scientific: "Mary is made of matter..she got sucked through a microscope and became the size of a molecule." The facing page shows Mary floating under the lens. The blackboard-style background is filled with "molecular" diagrams (mattresses, a moose, mums). Other sections are a mite macabre: "Jack Stack the Lumberjack has been struck by lightning one hundred and eleven times.." The lightning illuminates a skeleton, but after the page turn, the man appears in his jammies, normal, except that he can provide his own electricity. There is humor in the alliteration and mixed-media scenes: a puzzled parsnip, Victor the vanquished "plotting his vengeance," and an enigma featuring elephants and envelopes. The author respects his readers' intelligence, inserting expansive vocabulary, cameos from characters in previous books, people and plot threads that cross stories, and quiet details to discover in subsequent readings. An altogether stimulating, surprising, and satisfying reading experience.-Wendy Lukehart, District of Columbia Public Library (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
With wry humor, equally droll ink illustrations, and a solid dose of alliteration, Jeffers (the Hueys series) creates delightful mini-narratives for each letter of the alphabet. In the B story, "Burning a Bridge," the antagonistic relationship between neighbors Bernard and Bob reaches a breaking point: "But Bob learned an important lesson that day" after he burns down the bridge separating their homes-and traps himself on Bernard's side. In addition to the rampant alliteration in the stories and poems ("Mary is made of matter./ So is her mother./ And her mother's moose"), Jeffers's illustrations are full of unnamed people and objects that correspond to each letter, providing opportunities for interactive reading. Grim touches appear here and there-because half of Helen's house fell into the sea, getting up on the wrong side of the bed proves disastrous-but the overall mood is one of playful mischief. One thing is certain: if Jeffers's determined problem-solving duo, Owl and Octopus-who pop up throughout, rescuing drowning cucumbers and recovering stolen x-ray glasses-don't get to headline future books of their own, it'll be downright criminal. Ages 3-5. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
Each letter of the alphabet gets its own little story in this picture book that is much more than a simple set of ABCs. Whimsical, funny, occasionally tragic, and highly entertaining, this collection of (sometimes) interlocking tales is brilliantly inventive, from A (for astronaut Edmund, who is afraid of heights) to Z (for the zeppelin Edmund flies four daring feet above the ground). Jeffers's loose cartoon style lends itself to visual humor, with lots of sight gags delivered through line and color, such as daredevil Delilah boldly confronting all danger except the bellowing of her father when she's late for dinner. The stories are each four pages long and made up of just a few sentences, which often feature alliteration: "Mary is made of matter. So is her mother. And her mother's moose." The pictures frequently incorporate more words in bubbles, captions, and labels. Each letter brings its own delights, whether it is robots who steal rain clouds because they don't like getting wet or the enigmatic letter Q, in which a uniformed man searches around, under, and behind the book's pages for a missing question. Although alphabet books are usually for younger children, it's older kids who will delight here in the cleverness of the concepts and their execution. susan dove lempke (c) Copyright 2015. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
This amazing "menagerie" presents an original story for all 26 letters of the alphabet. Opening with A, "An Astronaut" tells of astronaut-in-training Edmund, hampered by his fear of heights. "Cup in the Cupboard" for letter C relates the sad story of Cup, whose move from cupboard to windowsill ends disastrously. In "Danger Delilah," letter D introduces a fearless superheroine, while L's tale, "The Lumberjack's Light," stars Jack, struck by lightning so often he doesn't need a plug for his light. "An Enigma" for letter E asks "[h]ow many elephants can you fit inside an envelope," referring readers to letter N and "Nearly Nine Thousand" for the answer. In letter J's, "Jelly Door," Jemima makes her front door out of jelly to make retrieving forgotten keys easy, while in letter K's, "The King," a king forgets his keys. The 26 amusing ministories come full circle with letter Z's, "Zeppelin," in which astronaut Edmund returns aboard a zeppelin. The silly, spare, slightly surreal text occasionally rhymes and endlessly surprises. Jeffers introduces each letter and story title on a separate, colored page, featuring the letter in childlike lettering. Deceptively nave pen, ink and watercolor illustrations in subdued blacks and grays on white backgrounds add to the overall whimsy. Reappearing visual elements provide intertextual humor. An utterly delightful alphabet book. (Picture book. 5-8) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
A GOOD ALPHABET book is like a raucous playroom for language, persuading children to internalize the ABCs by turning the letters into toys. Rhymes and rhythm, metaphor and simile, alliteration, assonance and consonance - the ABC book's verbal gymnastics match the alphabet's inherently visual nature, making the genre not just a feast for young readers but a rewarding medium for illustrators and designers too. Five new ABC books revel in that word and image play. With its dark red and sepia tones, the punningly titled "Alphabetabum" evokes a lost world of European composition books, exotic passports, vintage photo albums and old-school primers. It addresses children and nostalgic adult readers alike, with a rhyming verse for each letter accompanied by a 19th- or early-20th-century studio photo or carte de visite. Some readers might find something disturbing about this appropriation for amusement of found images of real people from the past. Take the cover image, of a small girl in a short dress with a sash, costumed for a dance performance, perhaps, looking out at the camera with a pleased smile, hands behind her back. Inside, the rhyme for A calls her "Awkward Agnes Alexandra" who "shows her ample ankles/although her knees are grander." I want to protest for her sake that there's nothing amiss about her ankles in their white socks. Still, children, like adults, might enjoy the chance to meet the eyes of this "Agnes" or that "Margo" gazing back at us from a vanished century. Vintage photos, like our own early reading memories, are inevitably laced with a sense of lost time. In "Alphabetabum," the rhymes infuse the letters with affect, reminding us of that other use we make of the alphabet: bringing order to random accumulations - such as old photos of strangers - that can elicit hard-to-define emotions. (One hopes that someone will claim some of these children as ancestors!) "Once Upon an Alphabet," by Oliver Jeffers ("How to Catch a Star," "The Day the Crayons Quit"), offers "short stories for all the letters," a time-honored approach to the genre, though Jeffers uses mostly prose rather than the usual all-rhyme. The letters appear as colorful outsize hand-drawn capitals on the "title page" of each story. For A, we get "An Astronaut," in bright teal on black. A little white figure stares up, daunted, at the giant letter; as we learn, he's afraid of heights. Others, recalling Edward Gorey's wicked "The Gashlycrumb Times," fare even less well than the astronaut. Poor Helen who lives in H's "half a house" rolls out of bed into the sea one morning; T's "terrible typewriter" conjures a typist-eating monster. C's cup, which dreams of living on the windowsill, falls and breaks in the leap from the cupboard. In the generous spirit of this book, though, O's octopus and owl, who "search for problems," glue it back together. The cup ends up broken again in the margins of the typewriter story, but children will enjoy detecting such morsels that trail through the pages. Michaël Escoffier and Kris Di Giacomo innovate on the ABC genre in "Take Away the A" by reminding us, like the loftiest deconstructionists, that language is built around trivial and arbitrary distinctions that can mark vast differences. One small change and everything changes: "Without the A," they show us, "the Beast is the Best." As profound and stimulating as adults might find the conceit, everything about this attractive book warmly addresses a child. Di Giacomo's palimpsest-like illustrations featuring appealing animal protagonists are their own reward. A little white rat threads its way through, its tiny reaction shots standing in for the child reader's. Wolves, witches, a fiddling cat and seven dwarves dance across the pages, gesturing to the wealth of children's literature beyond the ABCs. With rereading and maturing, young readers will discover the jokes gradually, if they don't at first go. All alphabet books require mastery of the letters in order to read them, but this one manages that paradox with genius. the aggressively hip "Alphabetics" mostly sticks to a conventional alphabet-book formula, with alliterative phrases on the left page and a full-page image on the right of each spread. Dawid Ryski's Boteroesque figures, with huge bodies and tiny heads and limbs, in a retro palette heavy on teal, gold and russet, illustrate the pointedly surreal free verses: "Atticus the altruistic astronaut/admires an ascending apple/while aviating through an anti-gravity abyss." (A is for astronaut these days, and yet inevitably that old apple still floats into view.) The verses rely on so many obscure words that the book includes a glossary, where you can look up "penny-farthing" (an early bicycle) and "lucha libre" (Mexican freestyle wrestling). You can also look up "carnie" and find the unkind characterization that carnival workers "frequently happen to be missing teeth." And, perhaps in keeping with its retro references to things like the jitterbug and mid-20th-century camera brands, elsewhere there's an incongruous image of headdress-wearing Indians. The Brooklyn/Portland artisanal aesthetic - there are "geek-chic glasses," "fro yo" and "quinoa" - might attract certain parents, and the alliterative verses are sometimes zingy, but it verges on amateurism in places, including some typos. Squarely in the primary-color, animal-intense tradition of the modern ABC book, Elizabeth Schoonmaker's "Square Cat ABC" brings back the orange kitty Eula from "Square Cat," in what is, yes, a lovely square book. A brilliant full-page red A for "Amazing" features a blue-and-pink mouse sliding down the leg of the letter into the next page, where she or he befriends the square cat, who's digging in her garden. Fans of "Square Cat" will recognize the theme of friendship's embrace of difference, as Eula introduces the frightened mouse to her pal the porcupine. Schoonmaker's page-filling red letters and bright watercolors enhance the short and sweet story meant for the youngest readers, which associates the letters with everyday words that a child might say: "Whoa," "Stop," "Hooray." When Eula persists in finding spinach "extremely Yucky," the friendly mouse offers her "Zucchini, perhaps?" Touches like that give "Square Cat ABC" the makings of a classic: Its substance comes from wearing its visual and verbal cleverness so lightly. PATRICIA CRAIN, a professor of English at New York University, is the author of "The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America From 'The New England Primer' to 'The Scarlet Letter.'"