By Kate Banks
Max's brothers won't share their stamp and coin collections, so Max starts collecting words instead, and his collection turns out to be the only one that can do something.
Max has two big brothers. Benjamin collects stamps, Karl collects coins, and neither of them will let Max near any of it. So Max decides he'll have a collection too, and he picks words. He snips them out of newspapers and magazines and piles them on the floor until they're spilling into the hall. Then he starts pushing the piles around and notices something: put the words in a different order and they mean a different thing. He lines up a worm and a crocodile and suddenly he isn't collecting anymore, he's telling a story. And now his brothers want in, because a stamp just sits there, and a word can eat a worm.
The trick of this book is that it makes words into objects your child can see. Kulikov draws every one of Max's words as a real cut-out scrap in its own font and color, scattered like confetti, so when Max slides them around to change what the sentence says, your child watches a sentence get built out of parts. That is a very hard idea explained without a single explanation. It's also why this one is a gift to a child still learning English: nothing here depends on already knowing a joke or a saying, the words are right there on the page to be pointed at, and the funny part is the crocodile, which needs no translation. And it's a satisfying little-brother story on its own terms, where the boy with the least ends up with the collection everyone wants.