The Dictionary Story

The illustrations for this children’s book are just next level! I adore the idea of the words from the dictionary manifesting as images jumping out of the dictionary - like a zebra galloping out of the pages. Amazing. The story itself is also lovely - seeing characters from words on the pages of a dictionary traveling through the book, bumping into other words manifesting as characters. It’s beautiful (a bit nonsensical, but fun and lovely).
It is a great book showing how words merge to create a fun story and how the words you choose define the story. Another creative feature of this book is that each page contains a page from a dictionary with the definitions of the words so young kids can see how much fun it is to look up words and add them to their vocabulary.
It is an easy book to recommend for little readers, even for the illustrations alone.

Don't pick this book up expecting to learn much about about the history of the dictionary, along the lines of Bryant and Sweet's The Right Word: Roget and Thesaurus. There is some information here, but the real draw is the innovative book design. I ended up having to read this book in three different ways. First, I read the text, hand lettered in Jeffers' distinctive half-cursive, half-print scrawl. This told the story of the dictionary, who was having an identity crisis, since all of the other books told stories while she, who had all of the words they used, told no story at all. A story develops, but it is a messy nonsensical one involving alligators and doughnuts and rulers who run roughshod over the dictionary, and ends with soap dropping on top of a tornado and making a real mess. Luckily, once everyone sang the alphabet song, all of the words went back into the correct order, and the dictionary decided to let the other books deal with telling tales.

On my second pass, I focused on the illustrations, because there is a lot to find there. There are some full dictionary pages that start to break down and slide to the bottom, but leave those for a moment. Several animals, along with a ruler and a Viking, scamper across the grayish tan pages, sometimes in a swirl of words. This starts and ends with a row of photographed books that have hand drawn titles.

I have to admit that at first I didn't read every word on the end papers, although I did notice that the first word of each dictionary entry formed a nice introduction. The definitions there, as well as in the running dictionary column that appeared under all of the illustrations and served as a visual road, were quirky, fun, and slightly nonsensical, like this one for panda: "A bear-like black-and-white mammal that lives in Chinas and eats plants, especially bamboo. They aren't interested in pancakes, lunch boxes, or syrup slurping alligators." Then, once I started looking at the definitions at the bottom of the pages, I had to go back and start all over again, because there's a sort of stream-of-consciousness commentary going on there.