Customer Reviews

A Gardener's Alphabet

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Mary Azarian was inspired by her own garden and has used the perfect form of illustration - woodcuts - to bring to life the alphabet of a garden.

The perspecives range from above and below the ground and show not only the joys but also hardships that come from creating a garden.

The simple words and strong visuals will be great for children learning about the natural world, but is also a beautiful gift for the gardener or nature lover in your life.

Mary Azarian's woodcut prints are so beautiful, dreamy, and detailed. My children would stare at them for hours and I would also. We removed the pages of this book (which now could be copied for home use) and tacked them on the wall where they easily learned their alphabet in a very pleasant way.

This is a nice early childhood book. It teaches children wonderfully about flowers and plants in the garden, an educational book based on the alphabet, one of those books where children will learn at about the same rate as the adult. It's worth having in the early childhood classroom up to the 3rd grade. Nice illustrations. As for the book being xenophobic (everyone is white in this book), the teacher and parent should already have a grasp on the idea of introducing children to a variety of cultures including African and African American, Asian, Arabic, and so on. There are many books which are effective in doing this, including,

Let's Eat: What Children Eat Around the World
One Child, One Seed: A South African Counting Book
Pass It On: African American Poetry for Children

Too many books to mention here to teach children to appreciate various cultures. This book is not purposely xenophoic, it just happens to be a book with white people in the garden, like in Britain. If the parent and teacher is conscious of the need for racial diversity in the literature and lessons of the classroom, then there is no problem with this book.

This is a lovely book. The illustrations are beautifully done, the vocabulary is carefully chosen - and the illustrations make very clear the meaning of unusual words like "xeriscape", but there's not much you can do for x anyway.

But, it's true. Every person in this book is white, and it really is a little weird. I don't live anywhere where I can consistently expect the people I meet to be white, so it would never occur to me to draw a whole book full of people of just that one race. I wonder where the author lives that it wouldn't occur to her to draw a more normal sample of the population.

It's not a bad book, it's just - that sort of thing is very obvious, and kinda annoying.

I got a chance to see Mary Azarian's new alphabet book yesterday. I think her illustrations are heartwarming and lovely, and have enjoyed them for years in the Cook's Garden catalog and in books like The Plain Reader. I'm also a gardener and a former children's librarian ,and I enjoy seeing gardening depicted in children's books. However, I must say I was sadly disapponted to see no people of color depicted in any of the illustrations in this book. Surely Ms. Azarian must have met a nonwhite gardener at some point in her life; if not, that's sad, and she is welcome to come to my house and meet me before the next book. As a person of color I felt saddened and left out as I looked through the pages; how would a small child (of any ethnicity) feel? Had it not been for this exclusion I would have joyfully given this book five stars.