The other day in the grocery store I overheard one woman explaining to another why she thought calculus was ridiculous: "You can’t add letters." True enough, and it led me to pondering one of my favorite time-twiddling questions: why is the alphabet in the order it is?

There is no real reason b should follow a beyond the fact that our general agreement to an alphabetical order allows things like libraries to flourish, and because it allows for the existence of today’s Calling Caldecott candidate, Patrick McDonnell’s — take a deep breath now — The Little Red Cat Who Ran Away and Learned His ABC’s (the Hard Way).

Our titular hero, awakening from a nap to notice a door left wide open, runs outside and immediately finds himself headed straight toward the gaping jaws of an alligator. But is that a threat or a greeting? The book is essentially wordless, so we don’t know, but off they go, soon joined in the race/chase by a bear and a chicken, who, surprised by a dragon, drops an egg. That the egg becomes an active member of the team is just one of the flourishes McDonnell bestows offhandledly; another is when a single page-turn takes the five from slipping on a wintry pond of ice to vine-swinging, Tarzan-style, in a great green jungle (except the egg, being armless, runs along on the ground below. Well of course it has legs).

The slenderest of plots emerges around the h page, when the cat starts getting homesick, but the real story here is the left-to-right race across each page or spread, and the funny surprises provided by the page-turns. McDonnell keeps everything pared down, with light washes and pertinent bits of landscape there just to foreground the zippy and expert pen-and-ink that provides character, action, and emotion. It’s all about the line work here, as the little red cat, his tail sometimes doing double duty as an exclamation point, roars from page to page displaying excitement, trepidation, determination, and affection for his new-found friends. And friends they are — on the n and o double-page spread the dragon appears to shout  “Nnnnnnnn Oooooooo!” when the other five accidentally run off a cliff (offering one of those witty page-turns, as the orientation of the next spread becomes vertical and the characters sprout parachutes).

I love a book that offers readers so much to do. Beyond figuring out what, for instance, the s is standing for, kids, unguided by text, will have to work out what’s going on in the story, and the narrative trajectory is just Dada enough (a unicorn?) to make it not too simple. The book is not for children learning their ABCs; it’s for those who are now ready, like the little red cat, to run with them.

Read the Horn Book Magazine review of The Little Red Cat Who Ran Away and Learned His ABC's (The Hard Way).