  | Full Text Reviews: School Library Journal - 11/01/2018 PreS-Gr 1—Monster siblings Natalie and Alphonse are back. Natalie can't wait to read aloud to Alphonse. She gets her first beginner reading book about a cat. The letters all look like prickles and bird feet. Nothing interesting happens to that cat. It just sits. Natalie decides she doesn't like books anymore and doesn't need to read, ever. Instead, she will make up stories and tell them to Alphonse. He suggests that her story should be in a book with pictures. They draw the pictures, and Natalie dictates the story to their dad as he writes it down. Natalie can mostly read the book they'd written. Primary color and screen-printed illustrations depict the simple yet endearing monsterlike characters. Creative use of thick black lines adds detail and illustrates how Natalie sees letters as bird feet, squiggles, and scratches floating across the page. The thick lines also complement the bold kidlike font, creating child-pleasing typography. New readers will understand Natalie's frustrations. VERDICT The siblings' spirited approach to literacy could also spark inspiration in children to create their own stories and not surrender to prickles and bird feet. An appealing read-aloud for those not quite ready to read on their own.—Mindy Hiatt, Salt Lake County Library Services - Copyright 2018 Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and/or School Library Journal used with permission. Booklist - 12/15/2018 Like her little sib Alphonse, Natalie loves, loves, loves books and stories, eagerly looking forward to reading by herself. But the words in her first reader just look like “prickles or birds’ feet.” Even when she laboriously puzzles them out with adult help, all she gets is, “The book was about a cat. The cat could sit.” Not even a story! Natalie huffs off to make up stories of her own with Alphonse, and the rest, as they say, is history, because in no time, she’s drawing pictures; getting her dad to pencil in the plotline; and working her way through a rousing, handmade original tale. In what may or may not be a significant bit of visual subtext, Natalie and her parents look like axolotls in Hirst’s blobby screen-printed scenes, but Alphonse and an older relative sport rabbit ears. Natalie’s path to literacy is both fun and valid for other emergent readers, even though drab interest-killers, like the school book she is saddled with, are fortunately rarer than they used to be. - Copyright 2018 Booklist. Loading...
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