A, My Name Is

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Based on the familiar jump-rope rhyme, this slight book skips through the alphabet and around the world. Cravath's (Three, Two, One Day) freewheeling, bustling watercolor art, animated with calligraphic and cartoonlike lines, incorporates objects that also begin with the featured letter: thus, Ian and Ida"We live in Indonesia,/ And we sell iguanas"are shown boating between an igloo and an iris, with islands in the distance; the iguanas grasp ice cream cones. Children are not likely to glean much about Indonesiaor Quebec, Sicily or Uruguaywith this wholly alphabet-based approach, but the resulting incongruity can be amusing. A key in back lists the alliterative items. Debut author Lyne's stanzas also often combine letters, which in the schoolyard would be considered cheating (Frankie lives in... Guatemala?). Unfortunately, the alliterative word combinations are not any more clever than those a child could improvise on the spot, and it's a lot more fun to make them up than it is to read them. Ages 3-7. (Mar.)

School Library Journal

PreS-Gr 2A favorite school-yard rhyme with a whimsical look. Cravath's illustrations are bright and cheerful, with plenty of details that supplement the text. The last page lists, alphabetically, other objects to discover. Children (or storytellers) can even exchange these words for those in the text, extending and altering the rhyme schemes ad infinitum. Jane Bayer's A My Name Is Alice (Dial, 1984) features animal characters illustrated by Steven Kellogg; here, Cravath has chosen a multicultural theme with both animals and humans that really enhance the text. Bayer's title is more of a teaching experience since each page identifies two characters in the pictures with their animal names, for example, "Henry is a HAMSTER." Since children love nonsense rhymes, they will enjoy Lyne's book, just as they have Bayer's for the last 13 years.Susan Garland, Maynard Public Library, MA