RED

This companion to Caldecott Honor book Green(2012) and its sequel, Blue(2018), explores the color red as symbol of our conflicted responses to nature.

A fox family travels; one young member falls behind. This fox—“lost red”—sleeps alone, then wanders. A blue pickup, an ominously large box in its bed, stops at a railroad crossing, headlights spotlighting the fox. A red-haired White girl plays in a fenced yard as the fox peers in. As in previous volumes, two-word, occasionally rhyming phrases and small die cuts characterize this work. The die cuts operate less interactively here than in the earlier titles, often simply picking out a shape or bits of color in previous or succeeding spreads. A notable exception is “rust red”: die cuts delineate three ominous nails poking from a board. A page turn reimagines those die cuts as seed heads, but text—“blood red”—and the fox’s cut paw will evoke readers’ empathetic pangs. Gorgeous, autumnal red-golds visually narrate the fox’s unwitting incursions into a rural landscape studded with human-made barriers: a chain-link fence bordering a laden apple tree; a looming “brick red” wall; most menacingly, “trick red,” a cage trap with red meat as bait inside. The girl, witnessing its entrapment, frees the fox, which relocates its clan. Seeger’s note acknowledges the development of Redas a narrative for the girl depicted at the end of Green.

Lush illustrations, sensitive interconnections, and subtle visual clues unite all three outstanding volumes.