Avalanche

A unique alphabet book features a boy, a dog, and a snowball on the move that disrupts the whole cosmos as it teaches children each letter from A to Z.

Grade 2-4-In this alphabet story, Rosen imagines the fantastical journey of a snowball after it leaves the hands of a young boy: "Once there was an Avalanche/that started out quite small./It all began when Bobby tossed/a harmless-looking ball...." From a simple chunk of snow to major avalanche, the white orb gains momentum as it hurls through the countryside picking up a doghouse, a garbage truck, a jet, a lake, and even whole nations along the way. It spins up into the air, out into space, and then back again-only to be caught on the last page by Bobby's dog Zippy. One or two words in each verse are capitalized to carry the alphabet concept forward. And there lies the problem; often the author's stretch to make the gimmick work-"The snowball flew through outer space,/where Questions all retreat" and "The Stars within the zodiac/lit on the snowball's brow"-interrupts the scan or muddles the meaning. While Butler's collage illustrations imaginatively display the snowball's journey, it will take an astute reader to make all the connections with the text. Purchase where there is a demand for alphabet books for older readers.
Barbara Elleman, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Rosen rolls through the alphabet and a gargantuan snowball rolls over the earth in this wintry fantasy. Each spread highlights several letters of the alphabet within key words: "Once there was an Avalanche/ that started out quite small./ It all began when Bobby tossed/ a harmless-looking ball." The snowball grows to Goliath proportions as it engulfs a garbage truck, a jet, mountains and the entire world. Ultimately the icy sphere encompasses the Universe and, in a concluding sci-fi twist, reverses its course to deposit every planet, city and house back in its proper place. Rosen, whose book is more about a rolling ball than a downhill snow-slide, tailors his word choice to accommodate the alphabetical scheme. Consequently, the sentences feel stilted: when the orb returns from outer space, "Zippy, Bobby's dog, he caught it!/ Gadzooks! What a throw!" In his first picture-book effort, Butler applies hand-painted details to cut-up photos of snow, sky and knit cloth. His early images present a convincing cluster of flying flakes, studded with pine trees and fences. But when he tries to imply infinite time and space, all embedded in ice, the result is a pedestrian picture of clocks and question marks. This snowball gets too big for its makers to handle. Ages 5-8.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Butler's cartoony collage artwork makes a highly appropriate match for Rosen's avalanche of ABCs. Bobby chucks a snowball and things get quickly out of hand: A Cat-food can gets clobbered, then a Doghouse, Evergreens, and a Fence. Every object adheres to the gathering mass, a juggernaut that reaches critical proportions around the letter N, spiraling off into outerspace, inhaling intergalactic rainbows, stars, and time itself. All of this happens in rhyme, and readers will be smiling through their impatience to see just how Rosen is going to bring this messy mass home: ``What else was left to feed the ball?/It filled the Universe!/The only place that it could go/was somewhere in reverse.'' The mass, shedding objects, returns to Earth, back to the snowy slope, back to Bobby's dog, Zippy, in a collapsing of time and space that would make a black hole proud. In fact, did it all really happen? The nub of this lunacy is that the alphabet still has 26 letters; no matter what words they form, they carry their own specific gravity, a constant in all the delightful flux. (Picture book. 5-8) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.