The Keeper of Wild Words

Intended to memorialize the dozens of nature words—acorn, minnow, violet, wren—cut from a recent edition of The Oxford Junior Dictionary, Smith’s picture book follows an intergenerational duo on a hunt to find various words’ real-world signifiers. “Words disappear if we don’t share them when we talk,” Mimi says to her granddaughter Brook; dubbing her granddaughter “The Keeper of Wild Words,” Mimi invites her on a scavenger hunt (“Bunches of VIOLETS spread underfoot”). The list is long, and the two smell, taste, and observe their way through the outdoors. Digital and mixed-media illustrations in saturated tints by Kloepper show the duo in a garden and the woods beyond. Readers may not understand this story fully until they read the author’s note by Smith, strangely placed at the end of the book; until then, it scans more like a story of aging or dementia. Like The Lost Words before it, this may offer a springboard for debate about the comparative value of words. Ages 5–8. (Mar.)