S is for Smiling Sunrise Review

Vick Wadhwa generously sent me a copy of S is for Smiling Sunrise by Wordsbright to review.   Upon my first perusal, the pictures are beautiful.  I love the illustrations and the colors that are used within.  It has the appearance of a happy photo book.  I am appreciative of the effort that he clearly invested to create an ABC book that would appeal to young children.  My kids enjoyed the colorful pages!   Including a cd with the rhyming song and a downloadable mp3 is a great use of current media options!  The thorough teacher guide, also downloadable from the website, offers questions to ask your preschooler, and suggested activities to accompany each letter.

Unfortunately, I have several qualms with this book that I can’t get past.   The foundation of the book is prose written to accompany the traditional ABC song.  The prose, unfortunately, doesn’t add anything to the song.  It is awkwardly written and forced to fit into the tune.

“A is for Artwork
Drawing and painting
Singing and dancing too
Art makes life interesting!”

Mr. Wadhwa also includes questions, and other out-of-place sentence functions within the rhymes.

For example:

L is for Leaves so green
Waving in the breeze
Did you know they’re making food?
Working with such ease!

He is a self-published author, and while I appreciate his efforts, he would have done well to run his book by a good editor.

Another troubling aspect in this ABC book, especially for my 8 year old, is the use of the word Excellence for the letter X.  (He brought it to my attention when I had given him the book to look over.) The X in the word is capitalized, while the rest of the word is lowercase.

eXcellence

For every other ABC letter in the book, the author chose a word that begins with the same letter.  This selection for the letter X may mislead children to spell the word incorrectly.  I appreciate that X words appropriate for an ABC book can be difficult to find, but I think the story should have been re-worked to find a more ideal word.

In conclusion, S is for Smiling Sunrise is a pretty, nicely illustrated ABC book.