Knocked from the shelves of the Lighthouse Library, friends Exclamation Point, Question Mark, Period, and Comma decide to take a vacation. Perusing the globe, they opt for an island destination. But once they arrive, they find chaos: an island with no punctuation to speak of, words running amok. Vacation quickly becomes a lesson in the necessity of punctuation for making sense of language.
Both fun and successfully pedagogical, PUNCTUATION TO THE RESCUE does an excellent job teaching its core lessons. The text doesn’t only define the function of each punctuation mark: that function is both visualized (e.g., the Period as a crossing guard with a stop sign) and consistently represented in the character’s dialogue (Exclamation Point shouts and exclaims, Question Mark asks questions, etc.). These mutually reinforcing mechanisms give each punctuation mark a clear character (although Comma’s dialogue notably can sometimes form run-on sentences—perhaps not perfect for a grammar-centered work). With an easy story fit for young readers, the text also deploys some great stretch vocabulary (bellow, frantic, stampede, proclaim) for those readers to learn.
Sara Not’s illustrations are an excellent support for the story and its pedagogical content. The art is bright, beautiful, and charming, especially relying on the strong contrasts of blue sea and sky against accents of red, orange, and yellow. The illustrations particularly excel at capturing energy and motion, from wind whipping through foliage to animals stampeding about the page. Each spread is also filled with winks of detail—asterisk-shaped starfish in one corner, @ symbol snails in another—all of which provide cute thematic support to the central action.
This reviewer read the EPUB edition, and did note a few issues with display, especially with text and image overlay. Window size seems to affect (without ever solving) problems of text overflowing the page, resulting in some words being cut off or unreadable. In one instance, no text was visible, despite the imagery suggesting there should be; it’s hard to tell if the text was somehow lost or obscured by the EPUB reader. With the default reader settings, some issues also arise when the black text crosses the black bodies of the punctuation mark characters. These consistent pain points do detract from the charm of the story, and they suggest a fixed layout (i.e., text embedded in the art itself, rather than displaying in a separate text layer) might be a better option.
Nonetheless, PUNCTUATION TO THE RESCUE remains a strong pedagogical tool with a clear grasp of its core concepts and great visual appeal.
Despite a few layout and display issues, Cheryl Olsten’s PUNCTUATION TO THE RESCUE (ill. Sara Not) is a brisk, fun primer on the form, function, and necessity of the major punctuation marks.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader