THE WORD EATER

An overstuffed tale that will nevertheless wriggle its way into readers’ affections, starring an out-crowd sixth grader and a tiny, worm-like creature who can make anything vanish by eating the word for it. Hatchling Fip’s taste for the printed word may be judged unacceptably “runtly and weakish” by his earthworm clan, but when he munches on an empty thumbtack box, loose papers suddenly avalanche from bulletin boards nationwide. Fip doesn’t stop there; unhappily on her way to being dubbed a SLUG (Sorry Loser Under Ground) by the classroom coterie MPOOE (Most Powerful Ones On Earth), Lerner Chanse spots him sampling an article about a newly discovered star. Learning later that the star has vanished from the skies, she confirms her suspicion by nudging him onto the school lunch menu (no more spinach soufflé—anywhere, ever again). Has Lerner found the way to acceptance—or to universal disaster? Both, as it turns out, though ensuing misadventures ranging from the near-catastrophic—as when Fip nearly eats the word “oxygen” out of her science homework—to the hilarious teach her that her little buddy’s ability is definitely nothing to trifle with. In the end, the universe is saved when a clever bookworm entices Fip to gobble down the words “Fip’s magic.” To drive home the point that actions can have unintended, far-reaching repercussions, Amato trucks in a sackful of side plots, including one wildly tangential tale involving a ruthless businessman who finally gets proper comeuppance for using thumbtacks, manufactured by captive children, to train attack dogs. Several stories bundled together, this amiable cautionary tale, often reminiscent of Clifton Fadiman’s Wally the Wordworm or Mary Haynes’s more melodramatic Wordchanger , makes a promising, if undisciplined, debut. (Fiction. 10-12)