I have some good laughs over the book offerings I see in the publisher's catalogues. Two of the most unlikely books I saw this year were: Priscilla Turner's The War Between the Vowels and the Consonants (FSG, $15.00) and The Amazing Pop-Up Grammar Book by Jennie Maizels and Kate Petty. "Let's see them make grammar and vowels and consonants appealing!" I scoffed.
According to Priscilla Turner the rivalry between Vowels and Consonants has been going on forever. "Capital P's (which is what lower case p's grow up to be) warned their children: "Never trust a Vowel! The long and the short of it is, they are sly, cunning, two-faced creatures." And the Vowels, again according to Turner "tended to be smug and stuck up. After all there were fewer of them. Surely that made them better than most consonants." The banter turns to mocking other's sounds which finally turns into physical violence. The violence escalates at an alarming rate until an Scrawl strolled into town and almost conquers the divided letters. Desperation forces the consonants and vowels to until into words like "scat" and "ciao" and finally a sentence, "go away you silly nonsense". The jumble whimpers , "I can't fight that. Next they'll make paragraphs...pages...and chapters..." and the scrawl scrams while letters lined up along the shopping street watch. The stores, incidentally bear names like, Babel's Barbershop and Verbal Variety). What a concept, teaching the value of letters, the meaning of metaphor, and the workings of war and peace all in a story that shifts from humor to drama with the turn of a page! The word play of the story might require parent explaining or better yet, an older listener to giggle with.
The Amazing Pop-up Grammar Book is aptly named. There are flaps to introduce nouns, the naming words. On the next page a spinning wheel shows the action words, or verbs, and the third page has a flip book that shows the profound effect of different adjectives. Similarly attractive and interactive pages advertise adverbs, pronouns prepositions, conjunctions, plurals, possessives and punctuation in a way that children won't be able to keep their hands or minds off them! This is one of those rare intelligent pop-ups whose concepts and presentation reflect a great deal of intelligence.
Most of the time when I jeer at cataolgue offerings the books I mock wind up in my famous bad book pile! These two books made me eat my words.