A Prairie Alphabet

Sandy Campbell is a reference librarian in the Science and Technology Library at the University of Alberta.

I can imagine antique dealers in 30 years or so taking this book apart
and selling individual prints for a small fortune. This is a beautiful
book. Each letter of the alphabet is illustrated by one of Yvette
Moore’s delightful paintings. Bannatyne-Cugnet’s alliterative
captions are imaginative and true to the prairie subjects in the
pictures. In this world, “c” stands for canola, “g” for gopher,
and “q” for quonset. Moore’s paintings are so detailed that they
look like paintings of photographs. The blue-jeans have all the
appropriate wrinkles, the dishes taken to the field are Corelle, and the
grocery bag says “Co-op” on it.

Nonetheless, there are a few flaws in the paintings. In what appears to
be a clumsy attempt to inject “ethnic” content, children in
Ukrainian dance dress and traditional Native dance dress have been
inserted into two of the pictures. The unusual barn setting for the
Ukrainian dancers is explained away in the notes and the children do
look natural in the setting. The person in Native dance dress, however,
looks so stiff, unnatural, and uninvolved in the activity of the picture
that he appears to have been superimposed on the scene. Moore also
leaves accuracy behind when she paints barn floors. The straw on the
floor in the “u” picture is so unrealistic as to be distracting.
Further, her barn floors and paddocks are remarkably free of cow-pies,
an ever-present part of prairie farm scenes.

While this book should have been called “A Rural Prairie Alphabet,”
since there is no depiction of urban prairie life, it is an excellent
book. It is a “must buy” for public and school libraries across
Canada. Urban children and children from other regions will learn a lot
from it. Prairie children and adults will delight in seeing their world
depicted so accurately. The reading level is about Grade 5, but younger
children will enjoy the pictures.