By Peter H. Reynolds
Some children collect stamps or rocks. Jerome collects words, sorted by how they sound when he says them.
Jerome collects words. Not for school, not to win anything, just words he likes the sound of. Short sweet ones. Two-syllable ones. The long ones that roll out like little songs. He keeps them in scrapbooks and sorts them by kind. Then one day he's carrying the whole stack, he trips, and the words spill and scramble together on the floor. That turns out to be the best thing that could have happened, because the mixed-up words fall into poems. Once Jerome sees what his collection can do, he carries it to the top of a hill and lets the wind take it, so everyone else gets a few.
Reynolds groups words the way a small child first meets them, by how they feel to say. Short ones, two-syllable ones, the long ones that sound like a song. Nobody teaches syllables anywhere in it; the grouping just sits on the page, and a child can soak it up or not. It asks very little of a reader. The pages are spare, the text is short, and the moment at the top of the hill is genuinely lovely. It helps to know going in that this is a celebration of words more than a story, and the plot is thin on purpose. A child who wants something to happen may drift. But for the child who already says a word twice because they liked how it went, this is a book about them. It also works well for a child learning English, since there's no joke to get and no idiom to untangle, just words held up to be enjoyed.