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MY WORDS by Grant Snider

MY WORDS

by Grant Snider ; illustrated by Grant Snider

Pub Date: Oct. 27th, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-290780-6
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

A young child develops a love for vocabulary.

Ava tells readers, right away, “I love words.” With bright chalk the white, pigtailed writer scrawls basic words like “yes,” “happy,” “cat,” and “rain” in green, blue, yellow, and pink. The narrator takes readers through the process of language acquisition, first as an infant who “started with no words,” expressing baby talk like “oooh eee gaga yaaa” while absorbing real words (“book / uh-oh / dog / no”), finally saying “ba!” while pointing to a ball. As the story proceeds, Ava gains more and more language, learning to talk “to friends in marvelous ways,” culminating in writerly ambitions; the last page shows the pink-dressed, cowboy-booted child holding taped-together pages entitled “Ava’s Book,” reading aloud to an assortment of toys and stuffed animals. The prose rhymes loosely, bouncing ahead in a rhythm that is a pleasure to read aloud. Unfortunately, while the miracle of language may be astonishing to an adult watching it, it is perhaps less than enthralling for a child going through it. With the exception of “marvelous,” all the words used are short and simple, appropriate for young children but obscuring the larger goal of reveling in a love of language. Ava, who is paper-white, is a pleasant-enough narrator, but there’s little here to hook child readers beyond, perhaps, pure identification.

Probably more for adults than for the children in their lives.

(Picture book. 4-7)