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Summary
Summary
When Max finds a pile of forgotten toys under the bed, his brothers Benjamin and Karl wonder what's so special about some old blocks. So Max shows them. With some clever twists of both blocks and imagination, he constructs not only a castle but an entire adventure, complete with pirates and knights, a dark dungeon and a dragon.
This ingenious sequel to Max ' s Words and Max ' s Dragons shows readers just how much fun wordplay can be. This title has Common Core connections.
Author Notes
Kate Banks and Boris Kulikov have also collaborated on Max's Words , a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year, and its sequel, Max's Dragon , as well as The Eraserheads . Kate Banks lives in the South of France and Boris Kulikov lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Reviews (4)
School Library Journal Review
K-Gr 2-Benjamin and Karl continue their condescending attitude toward their younger brother in this third adventure about Max. They are incredulous when he enthusiastically unearths a lettered block from beneath his bed. After finding other long-abandoned toys in the stash, he begins to construct a castle. Always one to see the potential of words, Max now trains his imagination on the letters within. As "moat" becomes a "boat" and "pirates" become "rat pies," the siblings are swept into the pretend world, and the scale transforms to life-size. When danger presents itself, quick-thinking Max rearranges the letters to alter the course of events; even when they fall into a "catastrophe" (a dungeon), the boys find "hope" and a "star." Brimming with clever wordplay, humor, and mixed-media scenes worthy of any child's dreams-come-true, the full impact is clearly the result of seasoned collaboration and experience; e.g., when Banks writes that the "drawer" contains a "reward," Kulikov's painting of a mirror proving the point is an inspired response. The perspectives are more dramatic, the contrast between light and dark is heightened, and there are more full-bleed spreads than in the earlier titles, especially at moments of tension. Those who have seen the previous books will recognize objects in the brothers' castle rooms. Emerging readers will enjoy deciphering the words formed by the blocks before they hear the text. Everyone will delight in the imagined world, and some children may be inspired to look under their beds.-Wendy Lukehart, Washington DC Public Library (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Imaginative Max, who first appeared in Max's Words, discovers that a whole new world can unfold from one simple discovery-in this case, a wooden letter block. Using more blocks, Max builds an enormous castle. Max and his two brothers enact a kind of three- dimensional Scrabble game, in which the words they spell explode into life. " `I will turn your sword into words,' said Max. `And this spear will become pears.' " (Max, as king, has a pacifist streak.) The stern of an approaching vessel spells "p-i-r-a-t-e-s," but with the flick of a wand, Max transforms it into a grinning rat holding "rat pies." Kulikov's chalky, boldly lit illustrations have a bright energy that feels almost improvisational, working in seamless harmony with Banks's nimble wordplay. Ages 4-8. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Banks and Kulikov's Max is back in his third escapade of wordplay.Billing it as a sequel to Max's Words (2006) and Max's Dragon (2008), this author/illustrator team again presents a clever tale that embodies the possibilities of a child's imagination. When Max finds something amazing in a box under his bedwooden alphabet blockshe uses them to start building a castle. His two older brothers get into the act, and, lo and behold, WALLS become HALLS, a MOAT becomes a BOAT, PIRATES become RAT PIES, and BATTLE becomes BABBLE as the boys move the blocks, rearrange letters and transform words into a full-blown castle scenario. That is, until the castle comes under siege by a BLACK CAT turned BLOCK CAT ("It must smell the rat pies," says Karl). Playful perspectives, vivid colors and animated action are brilliantly executed with details that require a second look, then a third. Kulikov takes readers back and forth from reality to fantasy using the alphabet blocks as a bridge in inspiring fashion. The "king called his knights to the round table. And for their loyal FEATS he organized a FEAST. From the castle TAPESTRY he made PASTRY. And from the PARAPETS he made TEA."This homage to the power of imagination one ingenious and entertaining game of wordplay. (Picture book. 5-8)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
THERE is no finer tradition in English-language education than transforming the letters of the alphabet into living, breathing objects of fun. Those of us who came of age in the 1970s and '80s may suppose that "Sesame Street" invented the concept - we might well be called Generation X because so many of us remember the letter X appearing in Muppet form on Guy Smiley's "Mystery Guest" game show. In fact, alphabetic anthropomorphism predates Jim Henson's furry crew by a couple of centuries. In "The Story of A," a fascinating look at "the alphabetization of America," Patricia Crain dates the presence of lively alphabet books for children to the 18th century: "From 1750 on," Grain writes, "the alphabet was dressed up and decked out, animated, ornamented, narrated, and consumed." Alphabet books and primers written expressly for children formed a new secular literary genre, often sold by peddlers to reach a mass audience, and designed to lure young readers into the joys of literacy. One of the earliest, "The Child's New Play-Thing," contains two highly animated alphabet rhymes: "A was an Archer" and "A Apple Pye" ("B bit it / C cut it / D divided it"). Each generation since has had its own personified alphabets. More recent touchstones include the raucous tree-climbing letters of "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom" and the insatiable E of "E Eats Everything," one of the droll music videos created for the album "Here Come the ABCs," by They Might Be Giants. The latest entries in this tradition find new ways to enliven A to Z. Tom Lichtenheld's "E-mergency!" imagines the letters sharing a house - the book has its origin in a short animated video, "Alphabet House" by Ezra Fields-Meyer, a remarkably creative -autistic 14-year-old. Lichtenheld came across the video on YouTube and was inspired to write and illustrate "E-mergency!" in Ezra's whimsical style. In Lichtenheld's telling, the alphabet enters crisis mode after the letter E suffers an accident on the stairs. All the others pitch in, with O enlisted to fill in so E can get better - make that "got bottor." Every page is chock-full of inventive letter-play, sometimes winking more to parent than child. (At one point, J looks in the mirror and asks, "Does this serif make my butt look big?") But the book quickly became a favorite of my alphabetically obsessed 5-year-old, who even enjoyed the endpaper illustration ranking the frequency of each letter's usage in the English language. "Operation Alphabet," written by Al MacCuish, similarly adorns letters with cartoonish faces and limbs, but this British import carries a whiff of Harry Potter by placing the alphabetic actors in the top-secret Ministry of Letters. When the little boy Charlie Foxtrot has trouble learning the alphabet at school, the ministry's Special Alphabet Service comes to save the day. Simply getting to Charlie's house is an adventure in itself, with the letters embarking on a perilous train ride in which a gallant duchess must rescue them from an alphabet-hungry cat. This book, too, will appeal as much to parents as to children, with Luciano Lozano's stylish illustrations recalling vintage graphic imagery of the '50s and '60s. What better way to have children identify with the alphabet than to make each letter stand for a child? In "An Annoying ABC," by Barbara Bottner, A to Z are represented by a classroom of rambunctious students from Adelaide to Zelda (with their teacher, Miss Mabel, as the central M, presiding over the chaos). Tiger-suited Adelaide annoys Bailey, and Bailey blames Clyde, setting into motion a domino effect of juvenile pandemonium that can be resolved only by returning to A, with apologies all around. All 26 characters are rendered by Michael Emberley with distinctive charm, using watercolor and pencil to move the action along fluidly from scene to scene. In "Max's Castle," by Kate Banks, the letters are simply letters, yet become ingenious tools for sparking a child's imagination. Young Max pulls out some old alphabet blocks from under his bed and decides to build a castle, despite initial skepticism from his older brothers, Benjamin and Karl. As with previous collaborations between Banks and the bold illustrator Boris Kulikov ("Max's Words," "Max's Dragon"), words become magical amulets that transmogrify the world around Max. Anything can happen in the castle Max constructs, simply by manipulation of the letters on the blocks. When the brothers spot pirates, in the form of a ship made from the letters P-I-R-A-T-E-S, Max defuses the situation by rearranging the blocks into RAT PIES. They are saved from a deadly ADDER with the addition of an L, which turns the snake into a LADDER and brings them to safety. Children who enjoy tinkering with words as Max does may end up in the realm of anagrams, palindromes, word squares and other ways of "making the alphabet dance," to quote the title of one wordplay anthology. Letters need not be mere vehicles for literacy, as these books demonstrate. They can be the very stuff of creativity, rooted in the age-old impulse to make the alphabet our plaything. Ben Zimmer, the former On Language columnist for The Times Magazine, is the executive producer of VisualThesaurus.com and Vocabulary.com.
