Max's Words

by Kate Banks, Boris Kulikov (Illustrator)

Overview

Bright, bold pictures incorporating clever wordplay accompany this highly original tale from Kate Banks and illustrator Boris Kulikov about a younger brother's ingenuity.

Max's brothers have grand collections that everyone makes a big fuss over. Benjamin collects stamps and Karl collects coins, and neither one will share with their little brother. So Max decides to start a collection of his own. He's going to collect words. He starts with small words that he cuts out of newspapers and magazines, but soon his collection has spilled out into the hall.

All the while, his brothers are watching. Benjamin brags that he has one thousand stamps. Karl is just a few coins short of five hundred. But a thousand stamps is really just a bunch of stamps, and a lot of coins is only a heap of money. A pile of words, however, can make a story.

Max's Words is a Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374399498
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	08/08/2006
Series:	Max's Words , #1
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	32
Sales rank:	120,887
Product dimensions:	10.40(w) x 10.25(h) x 0.30(d)
Lexile:	510L (what's this?)
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

Kate Banks (1960 – 2024) wrote many books for children, among them Max’s Words, And If the Moon Could Talk, winner of the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, and The Night Worker, winner of the Charlotte Zolotow Award. She grew up in Maine, where she and her two sisters and brother spent a lot of time outdoors, and where Banks developed an early love of reading. Banks attended Wellesley College and received her master's in history at Columbia University. She lived in Rome for eight years and lived in the South of France with her husband and two sons, Peter Anton and Maximilian.

Boris Kulikov is the critically acclaimed illustrator of many children's books. His work includes Papa's Mechanical Fish by Candace Fleming; W is for Webster by Tracey Fern; and the Max's Math series, written by Kate Banks.He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Editorial Reviews

Brims with wit. Readers and writers alike will enjoy the linguistic fun in this nearly word-perfect book.” —Starred, Publishers Weekly

“Fine examples of concrete poetry. This tale pays homage to the written word.” —Starred, School Library Journal

“Kids are naturally inclined to collect things, and the idea of accumulating something intangible in this delightful homage to storytelling will intrigue them. In a word: captivating.” —Booklist

From the Publisher

When his brothers won't share their stamp and coin collections, Max starts a rather unusual collection of his own: words clipped from magazines and newspapers, then creatively recombined into stories. With its deft interplay of words and pictures, this book celebrates the magic of language and-best of all-out-of-the-box thinking. (ages 4 to 8)
The August 2006 issue of Child magazine

Both clever and funny, Banks's (And if the Moon Could Talk) inventive picture book features literal and rambunctious word play. Max's brothers, Benjamin and Karl, each have impressive collections (stamps and coins, respectively). They laugh at Max when he decides to collect words. Kulikov's (Morris the Artist) clever illustrations feature Max's hundreds of words in different colors and fonts, sprinkled across the pages like confetti (at one point the boy is literally knee-deep in them). When Max's collection grows too large for his desk, he begins separating words into piles and realizes that, "when [he] puts his words in different orders, it made a big difference." (Writing "A blue crocodile ate the green iguana," he discovers, is very different from writing "The blue iguana ate a green crocodile.") When Max, with his hedgehog hair and thoughtful expressions, starts to write a story of his own about a worm and a crocodile, the real fun begins. Benjamin and Karl, always pictured as stuffy banker types with slicked-down hair and wearing vests, add sentences so the crocodile will eat Max's worm hero, and Max must race to find a sentence that will save his invented character. Banks's economically told tale brims with wit, and Kulikov's splashy illustrations easily keep the story Max writes from being confused with the overall plot. Readers and writers alike will enjoy the linguistic fun in this nearly word-perfect book. Ages 4-8. (Aug.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

PreS-Gr 2-Max's two older brothers are serious collectors: Benjamin saves stamps and Karl keeps coins. The youngest boy decides to accumulate words. He carefully selects them from newspapers and magazines, cutting out and sorting them by category: colors, foods, small ones, big ones. He copies entries from the dictionary onto pieces of paper and adds them to his mounting collection. It doesn't matter if coins or stamps are moved around, but words can be arranged and rearranged to create stories. Even though his siblings won't share pieces of their collections, Max gives away words and the three boys devise a short story together. Imaginative, softly colored illustrations reveal the gathered words scattered all over the pages. They are fine examples of concrete poetry: "HUNGRY" has a chunk bitten out of it; "ALLIGATOR" has teeth and an eye peering from the R; "BASEBALL" is printed in the shape of a bat. The text is set in a variety of styles and sometimes curves around the piles of Max's collection. This tale pays homage to the written word and may get children thinking about cutting and pasting their own stories or creating concrete poetry.-Maryann H. Owen, Racine Public Library, WI Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

When a lad's request for a stamp or a coin from his brothers' collections is rudely rejected, he takes up collecting something far more valuable. Kulikov's pop-eyed, faintly grotesque figures give the tale both a tongue-in-cheek air and a metaphorical quality. Max, disheveled and oddly dressed next to his neatly groomed siblings, is the picture of a creative type, and contemplating the drifts of words (in a wide variety of typefaces) that he's clipped from newspapers and magazines, he begins to lay out a story that soon has his brothers leaving their static gatherings of loot behind to join in: "When Benjamin put his stamps together, he had just a pile of stamps. When Karl put his coins together, he had just a pile of money. But when Max put his words together, he had a thought." It's a point that has been made elsewhere-most recently in Roni Schotter's The Boy Who Loved Words (March 2006), illustrated by Giselle Potter-but is always worth making again. (Picture book. 6-8)

Kirkus Reviews

There are few things more pleasurable for children than listening to a story and having the opportunity to pore over intriguing illustrations. T.R. Knight provides just that. As Max regards his brothers' collections of stamps and coins, he is perplexed about what he himself might collect. Then he’s inspired, and he’s off collecting words—cut-out printed words, words with personal connections, and even words from the dictionary. His collection has possibilities that strongly eclipse his brothers’ hobbies. Knight is an unobtrusive narrator who lets the action unfold through Max's involvement with his brothers. Knight narrates in a leisurely style, letting the story’s subtleties and interplay with the illustrations tell the tale. A.R. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

JUN/JUL 08 - AudioFile