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WHERE DO WORDS COME FROM? by Jeff Zwiers

WHERE DO WORDS COME FROM?

by Jeff Zwiers ; illustrated by Sr. Reny

Pub Date: May 28th, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4788-7404-1
Publisher: Reycraft Books

A playful answer to the titular question—ending with an invitation.

Words are everywhere, Zwiers writes, and they don’t come from “Wordshops” (where a Black-presenting worker might chisel away at new ones) or “Wordfarms” (where a figure with ghostly white hands harvests them), or even over “Worderfalls” (where they tumble over a psychedelic landscape with words embedded as the objects they represent). They come from people who make them up and use them…and so, why not “find or do something that has never had a name before” and invent one? Working under the name of his design studio, Spanish illustrator Javier Ramirez blows this terse but enticing message up into a series of riotous, logorrheic scenes in which many of the blocky figures—from buildings to butterflies, pastries to lightning bolts—contain or are even constructed from block letters. In earnest of the idea that words are everyone’s common property, he goes on to fill a pair of penultimate spreads with, first, a swirl of hands making the manual alphabet and then a barrage of given names…almost all in roman typefaces but reflecting a multicultural array of origins. Picture-book shelves are well stocked with expressions of the joy of learning new words; not so (or so much) the pleasures of creating them. (This book was reviewed digitally with 11.375-by-18-inch double-page spreads viewed at 70% of actual size.)

Just the thing to get young wordsmiths picking up their frindles—or whatever they might want to call their pens.

(Picture book. 6-8)