By: George Mac Allister
There is a particular category of educational children’s book that manages to be genuinely entertaining rather than instructively earnest, where the learning happens so naturally inside the pleasure of the reading experience that the child never quite notices the vocabulary lesson arriving. The Unknown Gnome from Nome belongs firmly in that category, and Keith A. Leitner and his co-author wife have accomplished something that most educational picture books never quite manage: they have made homophones legitimately funny. The premise, a gnome from Nome, Alaska who nobody knows, whose name is unknown, and who wanders through a story rich with the specific kind of wordplay that makes English simultaneously maddening and wonderful, is both educationally sound and genuinely delightful in the hands of writers who are clearly having as much fun with the language as they want their young readers to have.
Homophones, those pairs and triplets of words that sound identical but mean entirely different things, are one of the most reliably confusing features of the English language and one of the most reliable sources of genuine humor when they are played with rather than simply catalogued. The difference between know and no, gnome and Nome, unknown and un-known, is the kind of thing that children either find genuinely funny when it is pointed out with the right comic timing or genuinely baffling when it is presented as a rule to be memorized without context. Leitner has chosen the right approach, building the wordplay into the fabric of a story that gives each homophone pair its own natural moment of gentle comedy rather than inserting vocabulary instruction into a narrative that would rather be doing something else.
The specific choice of a gnome from Nome as the central character is a stroke of genuine creative intelligence. Nome, Alaska, is a real place with a name that functions perfectly as a homophone playground, and the gnome carries with him the specific charm of a character who exists slightly outside the ordinary world, whose very nature involves being slightly difficult to name and identify, making him the perfect guide through a landscape organized around the specific puzzle of words that sound the same but mean different things.
What distinguishes this book from the many vocabulary-focused children’s books that line elementary school library shelves is the warmth and the humor that the Leitners bring to the material. You sense throughout that these are two people who genuinely love language and who have made a book that reflects that love in a form accessible to the young readers who most need to develop their own relationship with the specificities and the pleasures of English vocabulary. The book works as entertainment and as education simultaneously, which is the only approach to educational children’s literature that actually produces lasting results.
If you are looking for a children’s book that teaches homophones through genuine humor and genuine storytelling rather than through instruction, The Unknown Gnome from Nome by Keith A. Leitner is exactly the book that belongs in your young reader’s hands. Grab your copy on Amazon today and introduce the gnome from Nome to every child in your life who is ready to discover that English is both bewildering and wonderful.
