Apple Pie ABC

Review also includes: One Two That’s My Shoe, 978-1408311967, £10.99 hbk

Ever since the ancient days of ‘A Apple Pie  / B Bit it / C Cut it etc people have been eager to string out the alphabet as a kind of story rather than to give it the customary, and usually boring, object sequence: A Apple / B ball /C Cat etc.  The main problem though is to craft your narrative into twenty-six stages, each beginning with a new, but fixed, letter of the alphabet without the whole thing losing momentum. (The A Apple Pie brigade have great trouble in getting their pie to survive to the end of the run.) Alison Murray deals with this a treat, her girl protagonist being greatly assisted by her dog. We are told by a publicity sheet that they are called Grace and Georgie but the book has them anonymously acting out a domestic drama as Georgie gets more and more interested in the Baking, Cooling and Dishing out of the pie until, having driven Grace away by his mournful Pining for it, he takes over the action and ends up ‘z z z z z z z z z’ going to sleep and dreaming of his ill-gotten feast. For all the book’s success in 2010, it has seemed worth waiting till 2011 to review it alongside Grace and Georgie’s companion volume where the cheeky hound pinches one of his mistress’s shoes and must be chased through enough obstacles (three teddies, four bricks…) to get us from one to ten. With the numerical sequence being so much shorter than the alphabetic one, Alison Murray can make the most of her own working of a text with the traditional ‘Buckle my shoe’ rhythms. As with ‘Apple Pie’, every page opening is joyously coloured and the flat two-dimensional images gain a fine momentum through both the text and the gyrations of that scamp Georgie.