Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, written by Bill Martin Jr and is a fun book to read! This book is all about the alphabets and rhyming! This is a great book to read for teachers AND parents! I can use this book in my classroom for teaching the alphabets and rhyming words! I can play the song that goes along with this book so that the students can learn how to recite the alphabets without even knowing it!

 

5 Stars

 

Lexile AD530L

This book is charmingly drawn, and the concept is very cute. The initial series of little poems for each letter is a bit hit or miss. I thought it was nicely done to tie them all in as members of a family, and that many of them were very clever, but some of them flowed a little poorly.

The other poems (the Friends portion of the book) didn't seem connected to the alphabet family, so I viewed them as separate little books.
The roof poem introduces children to the structural elements of a roof, but I personally couldn't sync up with the flow of the lines.
The teddy bear playing make-believe I enjoyed more, but I think the alphabet portion of the first section stands alone, and that these additions add additional pages but don't really work together.

When I was really tiny – before school started and the concept of friends was clear – my mother used to babysit a neighbor my age, the son of a family friend. His name was Jason and because I was three, I thought that a “Jason” was a type of relation that everyone had. Kind of like a cousin, but more into Ninja Turtles.

That’s what I thought of while starting this book: Ida and Jackson were bonding before they had teeth, with no concept that their relationship could be defined as something as unextraordinary as friendship. They grew up – Ida the daughter of a single father, Jackson (and James) the sons of a single mother – so constantly in each other’s presence that it seemed inevitable that their connection had to evolve into something “more than” friends. This special relationship is best quantified by the fact that Jackson has always referred to Ida simply as “I” – a self-identifying pronoun attached to another person.

Of course, the course of true love never did run smooth. Jackson is a somnambulist – he not only walks in his sleep, but creates works of art and sometimes even behaves violently. This causes problems, first with his relationship with James and eventually with Ida.

At first, I was put off because I didn’t quite understand the rationale behind Ida and Jackson’s behavior; I felt like the characters weren’t quite developed enough for me to understand why Ida pushes Jackson into something he doesn’t want and he subsequently rejects their relationship. I let the book simmer a bit in my thoughts, trying to sort out how to write a coherent review, and it eventually dawned on me: sometimes we are misled into believing our relationships are more secure, more meaningful, even more two-way than they really are. Whether it’s a romantic relationship, a familial one, or a close friendship, the other person often means more to us than we mean to them. It’s not necessarily a malicious thing; it’s just the way life goes sometimes. A failure to recognize it, though, can be devastating. Ida felt as though her lifelong history with Jackson meant their relationship transcended onto a new plane – they were more connected because of their constant presence in each other’s lives. In pushing Jackson beyond his comfort zone, Ida demonstrates that the connection may be something she wants more than something that is.

In the end, this was a thought-provoking book. I just kind of wish that the writing had been strong enough to get me there sooner. Alcott has a way with prose, but her construction is often a series of scenes strung together (a style I’ve never care for, though I know some people prefer that ultra-postmodernism in their writing), and I never really got a sense of the characters. Jackson, in particular, never truly came to life. I hope to keep an eye on Alcott in the future, even though this book ultimately fell a little short.

Might be because I was listening it as audio book. I know I didn't concentrate much on the story. I had to re-play it a couple of time just to get the story right and I still missed a lot of things. Though it's not really audio book's fault, it was recorded by Blackstone audio that I always trust not to bungle the reading. I admit the reader's twang perhaps annoy me a bit though it might be said it's authentic American voice. No, the fault lies more on my side. I was disturbed more times than I care to during the listening and I'm really committed to my regular reading of Doris Lessing's [b:The Golden Notebook|24100|The Golden Notebook|Doris Lessing|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347542179s/24100.jpg|99441]. Anyway, it's decent story, perhaps could touch me better on different occasion. I can relate to Ida's stance of appropriating Jackson as part of her and made those disastrous decisions she shouldn't have. It doesn't mean that she didn't annoy the hell out of me.An interesting thing that I listened this story after reading [b:Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep|13629711|Dreamland Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep|David K. Randall|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1339532790s/13629711.jpg|19237028] as Jackson's sleep problem reminded me of the chapter on Dreamland where a guy walk in his sleep and killed his mother-in-law..