The Children’s Book Review | July 4, 2016
Written and Created by Jack and Holman Wang
Age Range: All Ages
Hardcover Book: 24 pages
Publisher: Chronicle Books (2017)
ISBN: 978-1-4521-5252-3
What to Expect: Vocabulary, unique illustrations, classic stories
The Wang brothers Cozy Classics are unique first-word primers, and this addition to the series highlights The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The brothers cleverly summarize this childhood classic in 12 adjectives and nouns that represent scenes from the story. Each word accompanies photographs of handcrafted scenes that the brothers created. The figures are meticulously handmade down to the hair on their heads and the expressions on their faces. These unique illustrations put this book and the entire series into a class of their own.
The book appropriately begins with the word “storm” and is adjacent to a scene of Dorothy falling through the cyclone with text from the actual story serving as the background. The pages turn to “yellow” when Dorothy begins her journey on the yellow brick road and “scared” when she initially meets the lion she befriends. It all culminates to the last page of “home” when Dorothy is seen in bed waking from her dream.
What is especially fun about this book is that adults can enjoy it just as much as youngsters and they can fill in the rest of the well-known story as they read along. Overall, this story, and the others in this series (Jane Eye, Les Miserables, Pride & Prejudice, to name a few) can serve as great introductions to the original classics that children are exposed to later in middle and high school.
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About the Creators
Jack and Holman Wang are twin brothers who grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia, where Holman still lives. As well as being the creators of the Star Wars Epic Yarns board books, Jack is a professor of writing at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York, and Holman, a former middle school teacher, is an artist and author.
Cozy Classics: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by Jack and Holman Wang, was reviewed by Anna C. Iacovetta, Ph.D.. Discover more books like Cozy Classics: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by following along with our reviews and articles tagged with Board Book and Classics.