Fun Reads Friday: Invent New Words With Your Frindle

I love words. I make my living playing with words, painting pictures with words. The chorus to one of my favorite songs ends with the grammatically dubious, “It’s only words and words are all I have to take your heart away” (Words, by Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb).

So the premise of the delightful book Frindle, by Andrew Clements, caught my attention: Nick Allen, a curious and clever fifth-grader, invents a new name for an ink pen, and eventually has the whole nation calling pens by a new name—frindles.

Nick isn’t really a troublemaker. He reads a lot, thinks a lot, and loves devising creative solutions for pesky problems—like how can he get a teacher to forget to give the homework assignment. When dictionary-loving language arts teacher Mrs. Granger assigns Nick to write a report on how words are created, Nick wonders who decides what word a thing is called. “We all do,” Mrs. Granger tells him. People as a whole agree on the meaning, and the word and meaning get recorded in the dictionary.

Nick wants to see how that happens. He invents the word frindle and sets to work on a plan to get people to use that new word in place of pen. He begins by going into a little store and asking the shopkeeper for a frindle. Nick recruits a different person to do the same thing every day, and pretty soon the shopkeeper automatically reaches for a pen whenever a kid asks for a frindle. The experiment works!

The results of further experimentation are a bit hilarious and seem to drive Mrs. Granger nuts. It’s not until the end of the book that we find out that actually… No, let me scratch out the end of that sentence with my frindle. Why ruin the surprise?

While the novel Frindle has amassed quite a few impressive awards and slews of words in great reviews, I admit that I had some initial misgivings about recommending it to this audience. I struggled with what seemed like disobedience and disrespect for authority. But Nick learns about consequences as the frindle craze sweeps the school, town and country. He can’t stop it. And Nick’s parents work to walk that fine line between supporting creativity and respecting school authority, even if they think administration objections are overreactions to a lesson that Nick’s teacher inadvertently started.

There are a number of solid lessons in this book, from friendship to respect for others, to creative thinking, to taking responsibility for one’s own actions, to relationships between good students and caring teachers, to how words become words. There is no spiritual content in this short novel, but morals are clearly drawn. It’s a fun, funny and inventive adventure to amuse and satisfy readers eight to twelve years old.

So get out your frindles and see what new words you can create.