C Is for City

By Nikki Grimes

Book Overview

Here's Nikki Grimes's clever alphabet rhyme as a guide to a big city. From the ice-skating rink to the opera, C is for City is alive with activity. Pat Cummings's vivid illustrations are filled with... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1590780132
• ISBN13: 9781590780138
• Release Date: April 2002
• Publisher: Wordsong
• Length: 40 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.1" x 9.9" x 8.9"
• Age Range: 1 to 3 years
• Grade Range: Preschool

Customer Reviews

Great pictures of my own city

Now, before I even get started, I want to thank the author of this book for showing a picture of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Our copy of ABC NYC listed only "vendors" for V, and I was very disappointed because, well, the Verrazano is a pretty bridge and I've been looking at it as my touchstone since I was a kid. So seeing it in a picture book, the very same bridge my nieces can see from their mother's window or walking along the water - it's special to me. That doesn't affect my rating, it's just incidental. This book isn't an alphabet book that happens to have a citified theme, it's an ode to NYC that happens to be written in abecedarian format. And as odes to the city go, this one is pretty great. The author caught a lot of different events and scenes, and the scenes included an appropriate amount of diversity, something you don't always see in picture books. It really was like looking at my own home :) Only thing? It's not so much like looking at my home NOW. The pictures are a bit dated, they look more like NYC when I was a kid. And so this book *was* published when I was a kid, so that makes sense, but it did make me feel slightly awkward reading it... kinda like when you look at your high school yearbook and cringe at what you thought of as good fashion choices, you know?

C is for City. That's good enough for me.

C is for city. Which is to say, New York City. At least that's the impression you'll receive after reading Nikki Grimes's eclectic alphabet book. Picture books have learned something that Sesame Street knew years ago. Mainly, that kids dig cityscapes filled with letters and numbers. As a result, "C Is For City" is a metropolitan dive into the beauty and excitement of the New York City streets. It's a kickin' little number that teaches kids their alphabetic basics while giving them a taste of the high life. Even suburbanites will enjoy it. The best way to give you a sense of this concoction is to describe to you the first two pages. In them you've a fancy lady and her dog driving along a city scene that is both grimy and opulent. The words on the page read, "A is for arcade or ads for apartments/ on short streets with alleys alive with stray pets/ A is for Afghans named after their owners/ who drive them to art shows in silver Corvettes". In the pictures kids can find a variety of different things that all begin with the letter "a". Then they can flip to the last page in this book and see if they truly found all the "a" related objects. Each page or two page spread in the book is like this. Sometimes they sport a huge amount of objects. Other times, there are only a few. Through it all, Grimes's catchy well-paced alphabetic poems give clues to the various letters in each and every illustration. By the end of the book you find you've just taken a whirlwind tour through offices, operas, parks, parades, shops, streets, and every imaginable New York cityscape. It's surprisingly exhausting. It shouldn't surprise much of anybody that Nikki Grimes has written such catchy four line poems. Best known, perhaps, for her young adult novel, "Bronx Masquerade", Grimes is adept at poetic license and creation. Fortunately for her she's been paired with the multi-talented Pat Cummings. Cummings has packed each page with original situations and multi-racial characters. Everyone from snooty ladies walking their poodles to Hasidim in their black garb traverse the pages of this book. Kids reading this story should make sure to try to find the little black cat that pops up in each and every spread. He's a sneaky one. The book was originally written in 1995, but even though the pictures show almost every well-known New York landmark (everything from the Washington Square Arch to the Empire State Building), the Twin Towers are nowhere in sight. Quite by accident, parents everywhere have been saved the necessity of explaining the Towers' significance to their four-year-olds. Remarkable. Now I'll admit why I didn't give this puppy five stars. It's basically an unfair reason, but one that I'm unable to break away from. Anyone who is even vaguely familiar with Graeme Base's, "Animalia" will note the similarities between that picture book, and this one. And of the two, "Animalia" is the better written and illustrated. So if you want to get