By Brian Floca
A century of race cars from A to Z, with the words picked to sound like engines and a rhythm built for reading out loud.
It goes A to Z, and it also goes from 1901 to 2001. A Ford chugs down a dirt road on the first pages; a Formula One Ferrari takes its victory lap at the end. In between, the cars and tracks and drivers keep changing while the whole thing reads like one long race. The words are chosen for their sound as much as their meaning - the R page is 'Racing, rapid riding, rushing, roaring, risking.' Floca's ink-and-watercolor spreads are big and bold, easy to see from across a room. It won an American Library Association Notable Children's Book award.
Most alphabet books just park one word under each letter. This one uses the letters to keep the engine running - every letter kicks off a burst of words that sound like cars, and the alphabet is over before it ever feels like a lesson. It also packs a hundred years of real racing into forty pages, so a child who only knows today's cars gets to see where they came from. Read it for the noise the first few times; the history comes later on its own.