A Is For Bee

An Alphabet Book in Translation

by Ellen Heck

Review posted March 19, 2025.
Levine Querido, 2022. 36 pages.
Review written December 13, 2022, from a library book.
Starred Review

This book is creative and fascinating -- though you'll want to show it to older kids, who already know their English alphabet well, so they don't get confused.

The introduction is simple:

We speak to each other in many languages, and in some of them...

Then it goes right into an Alphabet book. The order is A to Z, and many of the animals you're used to see in alphabet books appear, but now they show up in different places.

On the first page, we've got:

A is for BEE

Anu in Igbo
Arl in Turkish
Aamoo in Ojibwe
Abelha in Portuguese

There's extended back matter, explaining the difficulties of translation and the Romanization of different alphabets. 69 languages are represented in this book, which they note is a small fraction of the more than 6,500 spoken across the world.

They've got a QR code you can scan to get to this page: levinequerido.com/AIsforBee and hear the words spoken aloud. I had a lot of fun exploring there.

This isn't really a book for learning other languages, but it's a beautiful book for delighting in the variety of human expression and for children to get an idea of the many amazing ways people speak.

The book goes from A is for Bee to Z is for Elephant, with delightful variety in between.