The War Between the Vowels and the Consonants - Hardcover

Turner, Priscilla

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374382360 ISBN 13: 9780374382360

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR), 1996

Synopsis

The unknown history of letters

For as long as any letter could remember, Vowels and Consonants had been enemies.

U without N? Q without U? Mpssh! you say. Yet once, long ago, P's and Q's minded their p's and q's, and though U and I deserved not one iota of respect. For their part, Vowels knew only that the dot on the youngest i was far moe important than the most capital W.

And so they came to wage a fierce war to prove who were the better letters. But as S's outflank E's and O's surround H's, an enemy of all the alphabet appers on the horizon--one which neither Vowels or Consonants can conquer alone.

In this hilarious look at the hidden life of letters, Priscilla and Whitney Turner reveal how sworn enemies become allies and discovered what you and I now take for granted: that the pen is mightier than the swrd.

About this title

About the Author

Priscilla Turner lives in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, with her husband and two children.

A teacher and illustrator, Whitney Turner is Priscilla's younger brother and lives in New York City.

From Kirkus Reviews

Only occasional flashes of cleverness illuminate this parable of warring camps uniting in the face of a common threat. The uneasy truce between the aristocratic vowels and the plebian consonants finally breaks down into open warfare, but at the advent of a giant scribble (oxymoronically described as ``zigs and zags with no form at all''), they join together to ``STOP'' the monster and bid it ``GO AWAY.'' `` `I can't fight that,' whimpered the jumble. `Next they'll make paragraphs . . . pages . . . chapters. . . ' '' Sprouting stick limbs and large hats, the letters, uppercase if adult, lowercase when young, swarm antlike across cleanly drawn backdrops. ``Just think what we can accomplish together,'' enthuses the Supreme Command to the Commander in Chief. ``The poems! The plays! Our memoirs!'' Actually, even careless readers will notice that both sides have been using each other right along in speech, an evidently unintended paradox. Next to books like Eve Merriam's Fighting Words (1992) or Bill Martin and John Archambault's Chicka Chicka Boom Boom (1989), the language play here seems clumsy. (Picture book. 6-8) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0374382360
• ISBN 13: 9780374382360
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 32
• Illustrator: Turner Whitney