This book bills itself as an "alphabet guessing game". It's true that there's some guessing involved, but all too often the answer is "This wrong letter is for this animal because this animal says something that starts with that letter", with little variation from these theme. My nieces (4 and 6) grasped the pattern within a few letters, which takes all the guessing out of this guessing game. However, other people might prefer it because of the transparency of so many of the letter-animal pairs.

The artwork is great. Very silly. F is for bird (because birds Fly) and we see a shot of a bird aviator. R is for Lion and we see the two parent lions scared witless because their cub has let out a huge ROAR. When M is for Cow, we see the poor milkmaid covering her ears because her herd is mooing so loudly.

I do have a slight concern about diversity. There are 42 people in this book, I just counted. Of these 42, 1 is black. 3 might generously be described as being dark enough to have a tan. And the remaining 38 are "peach", the so-called "flesh" color from the crayon box. Given that when this book was published, in 1980, blacks made up slightly more than 10% of the US population, I would expect to see about 4 black people (and a few Hispanics and Asians as well). Barring that, seeing no minorities would at least not smack so blatantly of tokenism! ( )

Q is for Duck by Mary Elting and Michael Folsom is subtitled “An Alphabet Guessing Game.” The reader is expected to make connections using the alphabet. Why is Q for Duck? Because a duck quacks, obviously! This is clever alphabet book.

This is a great Alphabet book to keep children guessing. It keeps them entertained, becuase they are required to think about what they animal could be. I loved the art work, and its simplicity.

A guessing game for younger students, this book does a good job relating letters with animals. Even as an adult I found myself trying to guess why each letter represented each animal and often was wrong.. Many of the pictures are humorous which also adds to the appeal of this book.

This book would be a fun way to go over the alphabet with beginning readers. Within a whole group setting we could read each page and brainstorm all of the different possibilities for each letter. I would write student responses on a poster to model each letter and validate student answers. Then I would have students draw pictures of animals or other objects in the room, provide and accompanying reason, and the next day have their classmates try to guess their riddles. ( )