Mrs. Peanuckle's Fruit Alphabet

Each page of Mrs. Peanuckle’s Fruit Alphabet can stand alone as a work of professional, tasteful, and stylish design. The variety of font size and style would make this a challenging read for a young reader, but as a board book, it’s more likely a story to be read aloud by an adult to an infant or toddler anyway. If you know Mrs. Peanuckle’s alphabet series, you know you can expect much more than “A is for Apple” and “B is for Banana.” Instead, “A is for Avocado,” which you may be surprised to learn is categorized as a fruit, and “K is Kumquat,” which, for the uninitiated, Mrs. Peanuckle assures is a fruit that is “fun to say and even more fun to eat.” The variety exhibited by the design of each page, combined with the original alphabet, will make re-reads a pleasure. “Z is for Zinc” was a slight disappointment because, while admittedly it cleverly ties back to “A is for Avocado”—zinc being a mineral that comes from avocados—zinc is just that: a mineral, and not a fruit. While it’s tough to hold it against Mrs. Peanuckle, it just seems that once the effort to discover “X is for Xigua” has been made, finding a fruit for letter Z seems like an achievable task. Of course, there’s also “I is for Ice Cream,” but it’s letters like Q, X, and Z that serve as a litmus test for alphabet book ingenuity. As always, the mystery of just who is Mrs. Peanuckle adds an intriguing touch to the title.