WORD BUILDERS- Ann Whitford Paul

I collect books about words and language play. This week, while browsing at the LIBRARY (I really am trying to curtail my book buying a little), I found a book that I really HAVE to own. WORD BUILDER is poet Ann Whitford Paul's latest creation. The whole book is one long metaphor; Paul compares the writing of a book to the building of a city. "Begin with 26 letters of the alphabet. Pile your words like blocks into sentence towers. The sentences become "paragraph villages" that transform into "chapter cities" and eventually become "a book." The text is very simple. Most pages contain only one or two words, or maybe a sentence. 

It's Kurt Cyrus' fabulous illustrations that really drew me to this book. The book begins with a little boy, dressed in a hard hat. The little boy uses a variety of machines and tools, everything from bulldozers to hammers, to "build" the three-dimensional word  illustrations on each page. I can picture kids like my son poring over these illustrations, then trying to draw their own.

This book is a "gotta have."