THE LOST COLORS

In this debut middle-grade novel, a girl and her talking cat must figure out why all the color has disappeared from the world.

Caitlin Maggert wakes up one day to find all the color has vanished. Her bedroom walls have turned from pink to gray. The brilliant yellow school bus is gray. Everything is gray. Caitlin’s mom doesn’t notice the change. When Caitlin brings it up with her friends—bespectacled Chinese adoptee Trudie and Tennessean Molly—it leads to a calamitous fight. Caitlin has a miserable day at school, but thankfully she isn’t totally alone in seeing the world in its new, colorless light. Her observations are confirmed by her ragdoll cat, Rio, who has started talking. Rio, in fact, has developed several extraordinary abilities, including telekinesis and suggestive mind control over feline lovers. These will come in handy when he joins Caitlin, Trudie, and Molly (now reconciled) in following a drip trail of yellow dots, tracking the missing colors to an abandoned building beyond the local dog park. What dire experiments are being conducted within? Can Rio, Caitlin, and friends thwart the schemes of the villainous MacDougal and return color to the world? In this series opener, Alexander writes in the third person, past tense, from Caitlin’s perspective or Rio’s. The prose is simple but lively, featuring plenty of short sentences to pull young readers along. The dialogue reflects the natural exuberance of schoolgirls on a quest. Caitlin is a likable protagonist—excitable and impatient but generally upbeat, choosing real friends rather than trying to be popular. Rio remains delightfully catlike in his talking form and is a fan favorite in the making. As is common in middle-grade works (and life), many of the events depicted carry disproportionate weight. Quarrels rear up from nowhere and feel like the end of the world. Making up leads to nirvana. The minor characters are similarly unshaded, although the “worst boy ever” behavior by a student named Podge does hint at a developing nuance. The story skips along in an unreserved celebration of the imagination, offering little explanation for its fantastical premises but not really needing to. Readers will take the colorless world at face value and adopt Rio into their hearts.

Fun and fast moving; a bright, vibrant adventure.