The Word collector

    

    A love of reading goes hand-in-hand with a love of words.  I've never (okay, seldom) been one to read the dictionary for fun, but I think every reader knows the thrill of finding a new word, a word that perfectly describes a thing you'd never had a precise way of describing before, a new combination of sounds, sometimes even an entirely new idea.  Sonja Wimmer's The Word Collector is a celebration of that thrill.

    Luna is a word collector who lives in a lighthouse high above the sky.  From her tower she uses her fishing net and pole to catch words for her collection:  

Funny words that tickle your palate when you say them, words so beautiful they make you cry, friendly words that embrace your soul.  Magic words, delicious words, long and short words, funny words, crazy words, magnificent words, little words, humble words, serious words...

But one day a tragedy strikes:  Luna finds that she is catching fewer and fewer new words in her net, and learns that this is because the people in the world below her have stopped caring about the beauty of language.  

    Determined to change this, Luna packs up her entire collection of words and flies across the world in an airship, scattering her precious words wherever they are needed to brighten the world.  At first, it seems her quest might be in vain--she has soon completely emptied her collection.  But then, to her relief, she sees that people are embracing the words that she has shared with them:

...people had started to throw letters to each other like balls.  They invented new words, they gave them to each other, they shared them, and they let them fly away again.  

    The story is good, and the illustrations are breathtaking--I love the pictures of Luna sitting in her home surrounded by jars full of brilliantly glowing words, of Luna catching words in her fishing net, of her perched on the edge of her lighthouse surrounded by stars.  But the best thing about this story for me is the depth of its theme.  

    On the surface, it is a simple story about the importance of beauty and language.  At a deeper level, though, it teaches one of the most important lessons about learning.  We do not collect words just so that we can appreciate them in our own private collection.  We learn so that we can give our knowledge back.  And hopefully, like Luna, when we share the knowledge that we have carefully collected, we do it in a way that helps the people and renews the society around us.  It is an important message, and it is presented skillfully; not hammered in but gently suggested, a seed planted in a child's mind now to hopefully grow in the future.  

    All in all an absolutely amazing book.  But I do have one problem with it: the words twist and turn across the pages--a beautiful aspect of the art, to be sure, but a mom or dad (or aunt or grandfather or babysitter...) reading this book in the dim light of a night-time bedroom with a kid perched on each shoulder is going to occasionally struggle to follow the lines of text, and even though I've read this many, many times I still loose track of a word here and there.  

This isn't an insurmountable difficulty, and the author has kindly included a plain-text version of the story at the back of the book to help parents find their way through (though flipping back and forth between your current page and the cheat-sheet is also a bit less than convenient).  Honestly, the easiest way to solve this problem is to read the book so often that you memorize it--and if your kids have anything to say about it, you probably will.