CATEGORY

A thoroughly Seussian tweak of the alphabet-book tradition, On Beyond Zebra is about all the letters that most people ignore--the ones that come after Z. Our hero (instantly recognizable to most Seuss fans as the boy who captured Thing One and Thing Two in The Cat in the Hat) takes his young friend, Conrad Cornelius O'Donald O'Dell, on a guided tour of all the weird creatures that begin with letters such as Yuzz, Wumbus, and Glikk. "And Nuh is the letter I use to spell Nutches, Who live in small caves, known as Nitches, for hutches." The message is pretty simple: the alphabet pins down boring old "reality," but if you explore further afield there are more interesting worlds to discover. "So, on beyond Z! It's high time you were shown, / That you really don't know all there is to be known." Explorers in need of guidance will even find a table of useful new letters (a beyondabet? a WumbaGlikk?) in the back. (Ages 4 to 8) --Richard Farr