C Is for City

Rating:
Summary: C is for City. That's good enough for me.
Review: C is for city. Which is to say, New York City. At least that's the impression you'll receive after reading Nikki Grimes's eclectic alphabet book. Picture books have learned something that Sesame Street knew years ago. Mainly, that kids dig cityscapes filled with letters and numbers. As a result, "C Is For City" is a metropolitan dive into the beauty and excitement of the New York City streets. It's a kickin' little number that teaches kids their alphabetic basics while giving them a taste of the high life. Even suburbanites will enjoy it.

The best way to give you a sense of this concoction is to describe to you the first two pages. In them you've a fancy lady and her dog driving along a city scene that is both grimy and opulent. The words on the page read, "A is for arcade or ads for apartments/ on short streets with alleys alive with stray pets/ A is for Afghans named after their owners/ who drive them to art shows in silver Corvettes". In the pictures kids can find a variety of different things that all begin with the letter "a". Then they can flip to the last page in this book and see if they truly found all the "a" related objects. Each page or two page spread in the book is like this. Sometimes they sport a huge amount of objects. Other times, there are only a few. Through it all, Grimes's catchy well-paced alphabetic poems give clues to the various letters in each and every illustration. By the end of the book you find you've just taken a whirlwind tour through offices, operas, parks, parades, shops, streets, and every imaginable New York cityscape. It's surprisingly exhausting.

It shouldn't surprise much of anybody that Nikki Grimes has written such catchy four line poems. Best known, perhaps, for her young adult novel, "Bronx Masquerade", Grimes is adept at poetic license and creation. Fortunately for her she's been paired with the multi-talented Pat Cummings. Cummings has packed each page with original situations and multi-racial characters. Everyone from snooty ladies walking their poodles to Hasidim in their black garb traverse the pages of this book. Kids reading this story should make sure to try to find the little black cat that pops up in each and every spread. He's a sneaky one. The book was originally written in 1995, but even though the pictures show almost every well-known New York landmark (everything from the Washington Square Arch to the Empire State Building), the Twin Towers are nowhere in sight. Quite by accident, parents everywhere have been saved the necessity of explaining the Towers' significance to their four-year-olds. Remarkable.

Now I'll admit why I didn't give this puppy five stars. It's basically an unfair reason, but one that I'm unable to break away from. Anyone who is even vaguely familiar with Graeme Base's, "Animalia" will note the similarities between that picture book, and this one. And of the two, "Animalia" is the better written and illustrated. So if you want to get your hands on the best alphabetic-find-all-the-objects-slash-animals-beginning-with-a-particular-letter book, this is not the one to purchase. But if you want TWO of the same kind, kindly locate and whisk away Grimes's, "C Is For City". It's definitely an exciting way to present the normally hum-drum alphabet. Consider pairing it with Nina Crews's, "The Neighborhood Mother Goose" for a particularly urban storytime.