The Little Explorer's Words
A Tale with 30 One-of-a-Kind Words from Around the World
A girl goes on a magical global adventure in The Little Explorer’s Words, a cross-cultural celebration of language.
For budding logophiles, Evi Triantafyllides’s whimsical picture book The Little Explorer’s Words highlights unusual words for hard-to-describe feelings and experiences from around the world.
Lexi spies a dot in her yard, follows it, and digs a hole to chase it down. In the hole, a rope appears, connecting her to thirty countries and new friends. Through them, she discovers new words.
The words vary widely, as does the geography, with Lexi experiencing bits of five continents. The words cover the feeling of switching a too-hot bite from one side of the mouth to another and the bad smell of someone’s shoes. Some words are silly and fun to know; others provide language for the ineffable.
At each stop, Lexi learns a little bit about what is important about the local culture, based on what the people enshrine in language. Notes about the words’ proper phonetic pronunciations, languages of origin, and definitions accompany each word; the final page includes a list of the words, their countries of origin, and the language too.
Between the definitions, a rhymed story narrates each incident, focusing on Lexi’s time with the child from another culture. Read aloud, the rhythms and rhymes have a somewhat forced quality, though. Still, the gentle suggestion that friendship is a good cross-cultural bridge is clear throughout.
The illustrations keep the focus on the vocabulary terms and their imagined meanings. Ever the explorer, Lexi is depicted as sweet and curious, with ringlets, a bucket hat, and a magnifying glass. The connective rope leaps through the book like a supernatural playground slide carrying Lexi from place to place.
A whirlwind adventure and a lexicon in one, the celebratory picture book The Little Explorer’s Words is about friendship, self-expression, and intercultural curiosity.
Reviewed by
Camille-Yvette Welsch
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
