To introduce another alphabet book into the world is a risky venture, given the apparent glut of these books on the market and the centuries’ worth of precedents in our libraries. Happily, this creative new abecedarium by Kevin Major and Alan Daniel makes a worthy contribution to the genre. Eh? to Zed presents an intelligent, inclusive, and sometimes funny view of Canadian identity. Since this book says much more about our country than it does about learning letters, it would work better with six- to eight-year-olds than preschoolers.

Major, the Newfoundland-based author renowned for his young adult novels and his pictorial Christmas book, The House of Wooden Santas, has selected an interesting collection of words: 104 of them (four for each letter of the alphabet) march across the tops of the pages in rhyming verse. As a whole, the collection is delightfully eclectic and sometimes eccentric, spanning place names, people, animals, food, and scientific innovation. The predictable Canadian icons are there – maples, Expo, and mounties – but so are the more exotic Anik, ice blind, and Xenon. After the Z page (where I was pleased to learn that the zipper is a Canadian invention) is an engagingly written and particularly well-designed section in which the author and illustrator provide “morsels of information” on the content they selected.

Ontario-based Alan Daniel (illustrator of The Story of Canada and the Bunnicula books, among others) has risen to the challenge of uniting 104 highly diverse images. The largely watercolour illustrations juxtapose folk-art figures, realistic paintings, and photographs in full-page tableaux. The pages are visually striking, often whimsical, and occasionally beautiful. “A” is for accolades, which are richly deserved by this clever book.