THE ZOO I DREW

Between heavily corrugated covers, “Doodler” (aka Todd Harris Goldman) offers a gallery of common zoo animals, Alligator to Zebra, depicted full-spread–size in a bright, simple graphic style. This is all very well and helps to demonstrate how it is that he has (according to the jacket blurb) “a successful clothing line” among his assets. Unfortunately he doesn’t stop with the art but adds uncommonly inept verses for each creature: B is for Beaver “…living in rivers and streams. / It knocks down trees / And, of course, builds dams / Because that’s its expertise!” He also slips in a unicorn for “U” and skips “X” entirely because “I couldn’t find an animal for X.” Direct budding zoophiles instead to such more thoughtfully conceived alphabetical menageries as David Frampton’s My Beastie Book of ABC (2002), Pat Mora’s Marimba! Animales from A to Z, illustrated by Doug Cushman (2006) or David McLiman’s Gone Wild: An Endangered Animal Alphabet (2006). (Picture book. 3-5)