Alphabeasts

Gorgeous artwork. Another animal alphabet book. It has rhyming couplets, like "A is for Alligator,/awake from a dream." Or "B is for Bat,/slurping ice cream." The weird thing is that the paintings are very detailed, but most of the objects in them don't start with the letter. The bat, for example, is carrying a hammer with his feet. I'm not sure why. "Hammer" doesn't start with B. He doesn't look like he's about to use the hammer for anything. Maybe it's supposed to be a "ball-peen hammer"? And there's random fruit on the table, like an apple, a pear, a cherry, and a jelly bean, chocolates, and some other candy, and a spoon. Okay. Those could be used to decorate the ice cream sundae that the bat is licking, but I really don't know what the purpose of the bat having a hammer and fruit is. I'm kind of baffled by that.

The other artwork is equally intricate and baffling. The different animals look like they're all in different rooms of the same house, which is depicted from the outside in the beginning and end. I thought X being a "xenosaur" was interesting. I didn't even know that's an animal. I had to look that one up. I like how U is "unicorn", but you actually don't see the front of it because it's hiding. It could just be a horse. Interesting. Just animals doing non-animal type things, like a hippopotamus about to play a violin. Very imaginative. Very pretty.