Retelling: One by one, amazing animals that begin with each letter of the alphabet with awesome foods that begin with the same letter as their name arrive at a colorful thanksgiving feast.

Thoughts and Feelings: I found it remarkable how many different words there are under the single umbrella of "food" and how many different names for animals exist. I wonder how long it would take to learn them all.

Alligator Arrived with Apples is an excellent example of an alphabet book to increase vocabulary. Not only does the book feature 24 different alphabetical animals (X and R are missing), each of them brings at least one example of alphabetical food to the feast, and does so in an alphabetical way, which gives you a verb, an adverb or an adjective for each letter as well (again, except X), and sometimes all three of those parts of speech. So you get sentences like: "Flamingo found fabulously flavored figs and fixed them flambé." and "Zebra zipped over a zaftig zucchini." Although the book does only use upper-case exemplars (a problem with most alphabet books, actually), it does use an unusual typeface, at least.