A gift book for budding readers and writers

Lovers of good writing, those who chew on words, savor their sounds, relish the way they strike pictures in the mind or prompt emotions, those are the kind of people who will want to pick up “The Right Word” and buy it for all the young readers and writers they know.

Author Jen Bryant’s bright-and-tight prose fits well with this young person’s version of a biography of Peter Mark Roget, whose famous thesaurus, first printed in 1852, continues to be updated and published more than a century and a half later. It’s a life story worth knowing.

And Melissa Sweet’s creative, playful illustrations make for just as good reading as she pulls in definition after definition from Roget’s lists of the synonyms for words. When young Peter tells his mother he is “fine,” for example, Sweet’s silhouetted caricature of the boy considers if “fine” is the right word for how he feels, and bubble thoughts including possible options like “glad,” “cheerful,” “well,” “dandy,” “never better,” “splendid,” “middling,” “nice” and “happy as the day is long.”

This Eerdmans Book for Young readers is a splendid way to introduce anyone age seven and up to one of the writing world’s riches.