WILDSPEAK

An exquisite and wondrous celebration of nature’s vocabulary.

Ada and Cora, brown-skinned youngsters with long dark hair, embark on exploratory rambles through stream, meadow, beach, mountain, and forest, collecting both specimens and the precise words that name what they see. Francis introduces readers to terms such as eddies (twisting currents) and scree (scattered mountain stones), weaving genuine nature terminology with invented compounds like stonelight and bottomshimmer. The narrative pulses with quiet wonder, enticing young naturalists to see wastelands transformed into “wildy-ness” teeming with “concrete breakers,” “rooty spies,” and “creeping petals.” Vangsnes’ watercolor, pastel, and collage illustrations create textured landscapes where golden meadows dissolve into abstract dots of light, forest canopies glow with “fairygold” luminescence, and tide pools become kaleidoscopic arrangements of sea stars and rockweed. Her compositional choices mirror the children’s shifting perspectives: aerial views of hillside scrambles, intimate close-ups of “websparkle” on dewdrops, expansive night skies swirling with possibility. The art has an organic energy; words dance across pages in varied fonts and orientations, visual onomatopoeia for wildspeak itself. Scrapbook-style endpapers featuring Ada and Cora’s nature journal sketches extend the invitation to observe, name, and create.

A gorgeously crafted paean to attentive seeing that will send readers outdoors hungry to coin their own wild words.