Customer Reviews

Ant and Bee: An Alphabetical Story

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I grew up with the Ant and Bee series (here in the US). I would love to see this series back in print. Is there anyway for Amazon to forward all the customers requests to the original published to bring them back. I now have children that I would like to share these books with. Christine Blumberg

My son loves this book and has for the last two years! It helped him learn the alphabet and now he has started to read it on his own. Why on earth would such a good series of books go out of print? I loved them when I was little and would like to be able to buy more for my four year old son.

These are the greatest little books. Perhaps enough great reviews will persuade Heinemann to reprint?

I also loved these books growing up in Australia and would love them for my two sons if they were reprinted!

I read this book many times as a child, and then again to both of my sons. Only as my sons began to ask questions about some odd moments in the plot of this highly unusual children's book, did I begin to recognize that nothing in the book makes any sense. Okay, I can accept that Ant and Bee are 3-inch long insects that walk about on two legs, that they live in a cup, which is only a little bigger than they, and that they have a friend who is not "a kind dog," but simply: "kind dog." (Though in this early novel, he is still simply: dog.) And he gives them a ride on his back. Into the fog. Which is so thick that dog does not see an egg (a THICK fog! And why is there an egg lying on the sidewalk?), and so steps upon it. Which makes him slip. (Dogs often slip??) And he bangs his head on a toy gun, no larger than his head, which, though he is wearing a hat, hurts his head. So Ant and Bee put ice on dog's head -- and then catch the melted drops in a jug! (Because they like to drink dog-flavored water? because the water would make a mess on the sidewalk?) They proceed on, find a locked door, with a key conveniently nearby. They open the door (we want our children to learn to break into locked doors), and find a leg. Which they later notice belongs to a man. Who dog asks: why are you standing on one leg? Because the other is caught in a "net." Because somehow dog could not see this )the leg is too far away? hidden somehow?). The "net" actually being a wire fence, upon which the man's sock is caught. From which dog, with his paws, is able to extricate the man, who could not do this for himself. The man expresses his gratitude by taking them for a ride in his wheelbarrow. to see his pig, who is crying, because a rat is eating his food, so dog chases the rat out of his hole and far away, becoming very hot in the process, and so needing water (here's where that jug of dog-water would have come in handy, but it's been left behind) so they find a tap, but no water comes out, but fortunately, just down the path, there's an urn on a stool from which the man serves dog by filling that jug we thought had been lost, and finally the man offers to take Ant and Bee home in his van, but instead they choose to live with a spider. Somehow they survive, and there are sequels.

This fantastic book may teach your child some three-letter words, but more importantly, will educate them in the art of automatic writing, in which external structures (in this case, an alphabetic list of three-letter words) is used to construct a story which unsurprisingly makes little sense.