Lexicon on the Lam! The Great Dictionary Caper by Judy Sierra

THIS STORY IS BROUGHT TO YOU

BY NOAH WEBSTER AND HIS DICTIONARY

Talk about being IN ORDER! What is more orderly than a dictionary?

It's absolutely, awesomely alphabetical.

But although the dictionary arranges words alphabetically, words themselves are not, strictly speaking, orderly at all. They are definitely disorderly.

Remaining in place, words get restless. And restive. And rebellious.

They sit in the dictionary. Day in. Day out. It's time for a break.

Words march to a different drummer. And the onomatopoeia words can be cacophonous.

BEEP! BANG!

Action words can't stay put.

RICOCHET! SOMERSAULT!

Anagrams keep switching their letters' places.

And watch out for palindromes. They don't know which way they want to GO!

Rhyming words are persnickety employees; they only work when they can hang out with each other.

And those synonyms are major snobs! They often hang out together in their own exclusive place--an exclusive secret society called The Thesaurus.

And those interjections! They tend to be RUDE!

Author Judy Sierra is fond of rhyming text and a wizardess of wordplay, especially in her salute to these and other properties of the language in her The Great Dictionary Caper (Simon and Schuster/Paula Wiseman Books), in which the lexicon rebels in linguistic fashion. Sierra lets the lingo loose,but conscientiously corrals its characters in an appended glossary, itself a form of dictionary. Artist Eric Comstock's little pen-and-ink illustrations lets the letters run free, and kids will find plenty of winsome wordplay contained within these covers.

"Teachers will have field day with this wordplay; this caper is clever, capricious, and cunning," says Kirkus Reviews" starred review.