Babble!: And How Punctuation Saved It

How would a town without punctuation sound? The sound might make you scream! Well, the village of Babble couldn’t scream or ask why not before a young stranger brought them some practical, linguistic gifts.

No one can understand anyone else in Babble, where monotonous sounds overlap and people can’t distinguish their own thoughts from speech. In this once-upon-a-time country, a little girl brings a bag of colorful little markings that might just save the community’s communication. These baffling markings are what we now know today as: periods, question marks, quotation marks, exclamation points, commas, and apostrophes.

Babble! is Harold and the Purple Crayon for the grammarian. It’s the little stranger girl with the red-orange punctuation. Instead of a solo creative journey away from and then back home, it’s a collective effort to make sense of the way we all communicate with each other. This picture book for kids around six to eight years old reminds us not to take these symbols for granted.