P is for Pterodactyl: The Worst Alphabet Book Ever, by Raj Haldar and Chris Carpenter

In a previous life I was an ESL teacher for adults, which opened my eyes even further to the atrocities of logic and reason contained in the English language. I honestly felt sorry for the students. I remember one asking me to clarify something confusing and then asking, “what is the rule?” To which I could only reply, “There isn’t one, you’ll just have to memorise that.”

More recently I was doing a reader with my Preppie last year and we came to something that did not fit with what she had been learning about words, reading and sounding out, she grabbed the book turned it over and demanded to know: “Who authored this?”

So when I saw P is for Pterodactyl I knew this was a book I wanted to read. A children’s alphabet book all about obscene English spelling? Yes, please. And it is as good as I hoped it would be.

Each page features a letter and words that either don’t start with that letter, should start with that letter, or use that letter in an unusual way. For example on the ‘G’ page we see the words gnat, gnome and gnocchi. And on the ‘F’ page we see that photo, phlegm, phooey and phone don’t start with F. A really funny one is V is for five, I’ll leave you to figure that out how.

The large and colourful illustrations are ‘cartoonish’ and simple, which provides a lovely balance to the more difficult vocabulary within the text.

Fortunately this book comes with a glossary as there are heaps of words that would be new and unusual for the average primary school kid (even adults will need to use the glossary for some terms, eg, Bdellium) Even with the glossary I would still suggest this book is for independent readers, even with an adult helping, I would think most kids in Prep -Grade 2 would struggle to ‘get’ all the ‘funny’ parts.