COLOR THE SKY

Sitting by the window, a young child sees a red bird flying past and is drawn outside.

Once in the garden, the child, who could be a girl or a boy, peeks out from behind a tree, gazes up at the bird, and narrates: “Red big. / Red small. / Red sits on my garden wall.” Red big refers to the huge tree with a vast canopy of red leaves, while Red small refers to the bird perched nearby. The child spies eight more birds, one by one, each a different color. While the birds’ species aren’t specified, they appear to be a red cardinal, a blue jay, a yellow canary, a red-winged blackbird, a white dove, a green hummingbird, an orange oriole, a purple honeycreeper, and a brown woodcreeper (or possibly a house wren). The singsong rhyming text introduces various early learning concepts such as directionality (“Brown left. / Brown right. / Brown in shadow. / Brown in light”) and height (“Blue low. / Blue high. / Blue has taken to the sky”), and the placement of words on the page cleverly underscores the concept. The backgrounds of each spread and the child’s face, skin, and clothing, which are transparent at first, cumulatively take on the hues of the birds until the pages frenetically burst with color. The pastel-and-charcoal illustrations become increasingly energetic, whimsical and full of scribbles, as the child progressively adopts the behavior of the birds, blissfully singing and losing themselves in euphoric flight. Unfortunately, the climactic ending scenes are crowded with so many abstract lines and have such a chaotic composition that they lack the sense of open space needed for flight. Most of the verse scans well, though a missing syllable at the end makes the closing line sag.

A visually interesting concept book, full of wonder and lightsomeness, that’s useful for teaching young ones about colors.