It's summer reading season, a great time for vocabulary growth. Sometimes, if you're lucky, summer reading will take you even deeper into an exploration of language, transcending a simple introduction to new words, and helping you to stop and really think about how they are made.

Carol Weston's Ava and Pip, a novel for young readers, is just such a one. Called "a love letter to language" by the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Ava and Pip opens with a discussion of palindromes, something Weston's narrator, and perhaps many of her readers, are being introduced to for the first time. 

"Palinwhat?" fifth grader Ava asks after her parents confess they chose her name because they "like palindromes." In the conversation that follows, Weston does a wonderful job of communicating what a palindrome is and, more importantly, the fun that can be had playing with words. 

"Guess who was the first woman in the world?" [Ava's sister] Pip asked.

"Huh?" I replied, then noticed how "huh" (H-U-H) is spelled. 

"Eve," Pip said. "E-V-E!"

Dad jumped in. "And guess what Adam said when he saw Eve?" 

"What?" I said, totally confused.

"Madam, I'm Adam!" Dad laughed.

...

"A whole sentence can be a palindrome?" I asked.

"Yes." Dad pointed to Mom's plate. "Like, 'Ma has a ham!'"

Pip spelled that out: "M-A-H-A-S-A-H-A-M."

I put down my fork, looked from my S-I-S to my M-O-M to my P-O-P, and started wondering if other people's families are as nutty as mine. 

Palindromes are more than just fodder for fun conversation, of course. Playing with words in the way palindromes teaches kids to do also encourages them look at words more closely. They are toys to be taken apart and reassembled. There are patterns to be studied, rules to understand. Not only is this kind of deep thinking fun and perfect for lazy summer afternoons in a hammock, the analysis and observation kids engage in will come in handy later on, when they are asked to use morphology clues to get at a word's meaning. So to palindromes, we can only say, Y-A-Y!

(If you're already a fan of palindromes, check out posts by Vocabulary.com lexicographer and general palindrome fan Ben Zimmer on the Symmys awards for best palindrome of the year. First, he writes about serving as a judge and then on the Symmys results.)