THE ARTFUL ALPHABET

Making her children's book debut, Jirankova-Limbrick composes an alphabetical symphony, with multicolored inks, attention to tiny details and a Harlequin child character to conduct the action. Her fastidious illustrations, which feature delicate calligraphy and eschew typeset material, follow no plot other than an A to Z progression; a girl in motley circus attire, with her pet dachshund, appears in every spread to unify the arrangement. For no particular reason, some inspiring letters get four pages in a row. The first of two spreads dedicated to the letter P introduces the acrobat girl as a puppeteer on a playbill; in the second, a theater's floorboards brim with P words (production, perfect, performance, etc.), and the girl and her dog join a procession of puppets (a prince, princess, penguin and pirate) across a proscenium. The letter H sits on a hilly landscape, composed of a vast array of minuscule green H's. Words such as husk, harmony, hurricane and hope sprout like weeds in the grass. The author solves the tricky X problem by hand-lettering a series of words with a gap where X needs to be: "fo... trot," "Me... ico," "tu... edo." The fuzzy-haired, graceful main character kneels next to these oversized words with a big red ink stamp, busily stamping the X's into their proper positions. Jirankova-

Limbrick follows a stream-of-consciousness logic, meditating on individual letters and random words in this compact and aptly titled volume. Quirky and engaging minutiae, hidden in plain sight, reward a curious reader. All ages. (Nov.)