The Words in Picture Books: The Longest Letsgoboy

Thank you, Vaunda Nelson, for mentioning The Longest Letsgoboy (by Derick Wilder, illustrated by Cátia Chien) in one of our writing group conversations. I will confess that I didn’t go looking for it right away—I’m not especially a dog person. I remember thinking, “Hmm, now if it had been a letsgocat…” But that couldn't work. “Let’s go” is not something one can say to a cat, is it?

Vaunda wrote in her blog about why she loved this book:

It feels so real, so yes-that’s-exactly-how-a-dog-would-see-it that I almost forget I’m a human reading the story and not a dog myself.

Here’s author Derick Wilder talking about how the book came to be.

Soon after I heard about it from Vaunda, the book started throwing itself at me wherever I went, in a kind of dog-like way. Books, I now realize, will do that sometimes. Cats, not so much.

I went to the library to return books I’d borrowed, and there was The Longest Letsgoboy, sitting on a display shelf. In an area bookstore, it had slipped off a table in the children’s section. On my next trip to the library, there it was again, sitting around, just about wagging its tail while I was looking for—that’s right!—something else. So I brought it home and read it, because what else could I do?

And by the end of it I was sniffling as if the loss in the book had been my own. Yes, even me, the not-so-wild-about-dogs person. There’s something about the combination of story and words that’s perfectly aligned, something about the compact, unerring way the viewpoint channels the words. Just something about the words.

Like these words: branchjumpers, fuzzhoppers, smoothstump. Words compounded out of other words to come up with an unforgettable, heartwarming mouthfeel.