In Letter Lunch, Vancouver illustrator and graphic designer Elisa Gutiérrez uses collage and comics-style panels to tell the simple story of a boy and girl attempting to assemble the ingredients for a meal. It quickly becomes clear that this isn’t your typical lunch: the characters are cooking with letters rather than food.   

The analogy proves apt in unexpected and sometimes delightful ways. The two check the cupboard but find only a single ingredient: the letter C. After a shopping list is drawn up, a search of the garden yields a few items. It also gives young readers an opportunity to debate what they see with their parents. Could those Rs plucked out of the ground be radishes? Rutabagas? What about the lowercase “t” that squirrel is nibbling on in the tree?

The pair’s next stop is the market, where they discover a huge selection of letters colourfully displayed in baskets, piled in bins, and hung like sausages above stall counters. They now have everything except a few elusive letters – X, Q, J, and Z – that require a hike up a cloud-covered mountaintop. When their basket is finally full, our young heroes sit down and take in the view before beginning their downward trek.

Back home, the letters are put in a bowl and tossed like a salad. The boy winces when he tastes them – something’s still missing. Spotting the problem, the girl gestures toward the spice rack: here are the vowels that will transform the consonants into a complete word-meal.

Gutiérrez employs a soft, easy-on-the-eyes palette of watercolour teals, blues, and greens (the marketplace introduces some vibrant, rusty reds), while the letters themselves are a collage of various fonts and cases. Though we could do without the feel-good but mostly random words the kids are inspired to paint after finishing their meal (“nature,” “determined,” “zest”), Letter Lunch is otherwise a visually appealing introduction to how language works, one that cleverly reaches young readers’ minds through their stomachs.