Is a dictionary a story? Does the dictionary want to tell a story? Is that why the title here has been changed from A Dictionary to The Dictionary Story? And who are those characters peeping out at the side? I spy a walrus, an alligator, a ghost, a queen, the moon, a donut, and a Viking. Now flip to the back cover and an alligator is staring at a zebra but the dictionary definitions have been reversed.
Zebra: A wild animal that looks like a small horse with black or brown and white stripes on its body. Likes hiding out at the back of dictionaries. Dislikes sudden surprises (see alligator).
Alligator: A large reptile that looks like a crocodile. Alligators have thick skin with many hard bumps. They live in rivers, lakes and swamps and swim with their babies in their mouths. They also have a special fondness for baked sugary snacks.
Peel back the dust jacket. The blue cloth cover has an embossed alligator on the front cover and an embossed zebra on the back cover. I adore these extra features. So much care has gone into the design of this book and wait until you see the end papers!
At first glance the end papers look like pages from a dictionary but then you realise the words are not in alphabetical order. The bold words actually form a sentence:
The first words were born inside our heads where they wriggled around a long time and slowly crawled out of our mouths and into the ears of other people. Like words writing was a bit hit in no time at all there were secret notes ride jokes and graffiti all over the place. This explosion of words meant we needed to find a new home for all these tiny marks. People soon realised it would be useful to have a book explain this type of thing that book was called a dictionary.
Dictionary: A book full of words and their meanings. The words are set out in alphabetical order and generally stay put, although, when things get a bit dull, they sometimes have a little shuffle and a new story pops out.
Story: A description of events either real or imagined. Some stories are told with words, others use pictures and lots of them get copied into books. Books carry stories around until someone like you finds them a home in their imagination.
There are two layers to The Dictionary Story. The blurb below describes the plot which is presented in a hand-written font and involves all those characters from the cover. Meanwhile each page also has dictionary extracts but these need close reading because they contain way more than usual dry definitions. I can certainly see why this book took seven years to create.
(can Dictionary put herself back together? Maybe with a little help from some friends!) NPR interview
Here is another example:
Underpants: A piece of clothing that goes from the top of your legs to your waits. Some people decide to wear them on top of heads but that very rarely works out well.
When I saw The Dictionary Story in a London bookshop, I was very keen to buy and read it. Luckily, I had a $10 voucher for one of our Sydney Independant bookstores (Abbeys). Many school libraries here in Australia will now have this book because it was sent out by Australian Standing Orders (Scholastic Australia) as a title in their international pack. You could compare the ASO teachers notes with these from the publisher Walker Books. You can hear Sam and Oliver talking about their book here.
Bookseller blurb: Dictionary wishes she could tell a story just like the other books. So one day she decides to bring her words to life. How exciting it is to finally have an adventure on her very own pages! But what will she do when everything gets out of control—all in a jumble—and her characters collide, causing the most enormous tantrum to explode. This isn’t what she wanted at all! How on earth will she find sense in all this chaos? Her friend Alphabet knows exactly what to do and sings a song that brings calm and order to Dictionary’s pages once again.
