Customer Reviews

2 reviews

• David Vigar

  “It takes a lot of bottles / To slay an axolotl” begins Simon Fisher’s Alphabetical Menagerie, setting out on its mission to portray exotic and often endangered animals in poems, pictures and prose - one for every letter. Each page has a six-line poem about the creature in question plus a colourful illustration by Dave Smith. A bonus comes at the foot of each page with a bit of factual prose that provides some fast facts and colourful stories about the animals. Therefore, we learn that the axolotl is a salamander originally found in Mexican lakes. Turn the page and you find there are 16,000 kinds of bees. Later you learn what an unau is and how many hearts an octopus has. The book works for young children as a way to learn the alphabet and for older ones as a means to pick up some science and geography. This was a pandemic lockdown project for the author who subsequently thought the verses and information might entertain younger members of his family. Doubtless, it has done so and will do the same for many other readers young and old.
  

• Martyn Chalk

  Alphabetical Mengerie by Simon Fisher
  
  Many children`s books are age specific, but Simon Fishers Alphabetical Menagerie does more than that, it spans the family; young ones will enjoy the pictures as they are being read to; older children like our nine year old granddaughter read it with enormous interest and enjoyment and the little details slipped in at the end of the pages tempted one grandfather to Google to find out more.
  The text is beautifully written and the choice of animals includes some that are less familiar. The illustrations are lively and colourful.
  This Is a first book by the author. We hope for more.

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