Mary Murphy’s The Alphabet Keeper is a delightfully funny story about a woman who keeps the alphabet caged in her home. The trench coat-wearing, angry-looking woman is a unique villain, a far cry from the usual rotund moustached man. Keeping all of her letters caged in the dark under lock and key while she grumbles in her chair, she is very much unlike most other villains I’ve at least ever come across!

One day, as the letter keeper is cleaning out the letters’ cage—very much like a bird cage with an even tighter lack of elbow room—they all escape out the window. Off they go on an adventure, misleading the keeper and taking her on a wild goose chase. The best part of the adventure is that the letters, with their newly found freedom, can add or subtract themselves from anything and change it to something else!

For example, as the letters meander throughout the park, the keeper closes in on them with her net (much like the classic dog-catcher’s net of classic cartoons)—and the letters turn “park” into “bark.” Suddenly, instead of being in the park, the keeper is being chased by a wild dog!

The letters continue to thwart her in her evil plot, changing her bus to a bush, her boat deck into a duck, and her evil plan to a simple plant. When I read the part where she yells at the plant, calls it stupid and kicks it, I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. The story is just that fun and silly. The letters keep evading her, changing a hedge to an edge over which the keeper trips, rats into a star that perplexes her, and the word loud into a cloud where they hide.

However, she catches them in the cloud, and just when you think the letters are going to be imprisoned again, they turn here into there and escape. One of their best transformations, I think, is on the next page when they change her hat to a cat on her head, which is very cute, and then the cat turns into chat and the lady has to wait around and talk to herself! By now my daughter and I were rolling on the floor laughing.

Needless to say, the alphabet escapes—and the laughs continue to the very last page. It’s a wonderful story and introduces a great game you can play by changing letters around.