In The Word Trove, we meet a young word who has lost it’s meaning. As its journey begins, the word doesn’t know where to begin or where it wants to end. We follow along as it meets new words, has literary themed adventures and makes small steps towards self-discovery.
Now first off, I absolutely love the concept of this book. I am a huge book and language nerd, and there is nothing better, in my opinion, than a truly clever play on words.
Yet, I didn’t have the highest of expectations for The Word Trove. This level of anthropomorphism makes the story read almost like an allegory, like Pilgrim’s Progress, rather than as a fully imagined, fleshed out story world.
I will be completely honest here, the thing that pushed me to get this book in the end was not the excerpt I read of the first few chapters, but in fact pictures I saw of the beautiful hardcover of this book.
I settled in to read The Word Trove fairly quickly, knowing that even if it wasn’t brilliant it would be a bit of fun, and it is delightfully short. I was not overly impressed with the beginning of the book, and I found myself accidentally picturing the old Salty the Songbook cartoons I watched as a child. The feel is definitely akin to the Disney film Inside Out in many ways, only less colourful.
I felt that the writing for the first few chapter lacked a lot of depth, and we were simply being told a sequence of events, without emotion or undercurrents. Looking back, I think that maybe some of that was on purpose, with the story starting very black and white, and starting to get more coloured in as the word progresses through its journey of discovery. There is also a chance that some style was lost in translation.
However, around the middle of the book, from the chapter called Langwich, there was a huge shift in creativity and interest level. I feel like the author (or possibly the translator?) stopped leaning so much on heavy-handed literary references, and started to come up with his own unique story.
I absolutely loved the Linguistic Games passage and was tickled by the character of Wordsmith. There were things about the ending that were completely brilliant, which I will think back on often. However, all things considered I still landed on a 3/5 star review for this one. The concept was definitely there, and I would love to be able to read it in the original German to see the differences.
I would recommend this book to language nerds, and lit-lovers looking for a quick and easy read about language.
Now first off, I absolutely love the concept of this book. I am a huge book and language nerd, and there is nothing better, in my opinion, than a truly clever play on words.
Yet, I didn’t have the highest of expectations for The Word Trove. This level of anthropomorphism makes the story read almost like an allegory, like Pilgrim’s Progress, rather than as a fully imagined, fleshed out story world.
I will be completely honest here, the thing that pushed me to get this book in the end was not the excerpt I read of the first few chapters, but in fact pictures I saw of the beautiful hardcover of this book.
I settled in to read The Word Trove fairly quickly, knowing that even if it wasn’t brilliant it would be a bit of fun, and it is delightfully short. I was not overly impressed with the beginning of the book, and I found myself accidentally picturing the old Salty the Songbook cartoons I watched as a child. The feel is definitely akin to the Disney film Inside Out in many ways, only less colourful.
I felt that the writing for the first few chapter lacked a lot of depth, and we were simply being told a sequence of events, without emotion or undercurrents. Looking back, I think that maybe some of that was on purpose, with the story starting very black and white, and starting to get more coloured in as the word progresses through its journey of discovery. There is also a chance that some style was lost in translation.
However, around the middle of the book, from the chapter called Langwich, there was a huge shift in creativity and interest level. I feel like the author (or possibly the translator?) stopped leaning so much on heavy-handed literary references, and started to come up with his own unique story.
I absolutely loved the Linguistic Games passage and was tickled by the character of Wordsmith. There were things about the ending that were completely brilliant, which I will think back on often. However, all things considered I still landed on a 3/5 star review for this one. The concept was definitely there, and I would love to be able to read it in the original German to see the differences.
I would recommend this book to language nerds, and lit-lovers looking for a quick and easy read about language.