By Roni Schotter
Selig collects words in his pockets because he loves the way they sound, and the other children think he's strange until he figures out what all those words are for.
Selig loves words. He hears a good one, luscious, or mumbo jumbo, or scrumptious, writes it down, and stuffs it in his pocket, and soon his pockets are full and his room is full and his classmates are calling him Odd Boy and worse. His parents quietly worry too. So he sets off to figure out what he's meant to do with all of it, falls asleep under a tree, and a genie in his dream tells him to find his purpose. He does: he starts giving the words away, handing exactly the right one to a poet who's stuck, and to a shy man who can't tell the woman he loves how he feels. The words only do anything once they're out of his pocket and in someone else's hands.
The words are the point, and Schotter doesn't dumb them down. The text is packed with big, chewy ones, luscious, cacophony, mellifluous, set in sentences that carry them so well your child picks up the meaning from the sound and the context, without anyone stopping to define a thing. There's a glossary in the back for the ones that don't stick. That alone would make it a real vocabulary workout. But the reason I'd reach for it is Selig himself. If you have a child who is a bit much, who loves one odd thing loudly and gets looked at sideways for it, this is a book that says the thing you love is a gift you just haven't learned to give away yet. That's the bigger draw.