What a Difference a Dot Makes! Little i by Michael Hall

WHEN LITTLE i'S DOT FELL OFF.... 1

IT ROLLED DOWN A HILL,

AND SPLASHED INTO THE SEA.

The rest of the alphabet is discombobulated. Little i didn't look like one of them anymore! He looked like a ... number! Weird!

"no way" said n and o and w, a, and y.

There is nothing for Little i to do but follow his missing dot as it is tossed away upon the waves. He finally made landfall and followed the beach all the way around the island, but everywhere he looked, his dot was NOT.

But there were exciting things to see as he searched. He saw a cascade of exclamation points, a garden of green sprouting commas, and a dazzling grotto of bright, gemlike asterisks. And beyond a scary bridge, what did he spot? His DOT.

BUT NOW, ODDLY, THE DOT FELT AWKWARD.

LITTLE i HAD GROWN TO LIKE BEING DOTLESS.

WHAT HAD LITTLE i BECOME?

Something had changed about Little i. Now he was...

A WORD.

"I," SAID BIG I!

Even little letters can can grow up and find themselves, in Michael Hall's latest, Little i (Greenwillow Books, 2017). Author-illustrator Michael Hall's trademark tissue collaged art is gorgeously colored, and his text takes on both typology and growing up, no small feat, sending his little letter out on an allegorical quest literally to find himself, while along the way introducing young readers to quite a few new punctuation marks--hyphens, exclamation points, and question marks, to name a few, with even his outgrown dot re-purposed as the absolutely essential period (which I will now put to use).

"Little i may be a mere cutout letter, but his humanity shines through,” says the New York Times Review."

Other books by Michael Hall which teach and delight are his Red: A Crayon's Story, Wonderfall, Perfect Square. and My Heart Is Like a Zoo. (see reviews here).