THE GIFT OF DRISCOLL LIPSCOMB

A lyrical parable, told in a voice that is big on wonder and small on irony. The narrator has a painter friend, Driscoll Lipscomb, who gives her a pot of paint every year for her birthday: red when she turns four, orange when she turns five, and so on, until she owns all the colors of the rainbow. Every year she learns to paint objects of the given color, but while she learns to paint, she also learns to see, and the book ends with a scene of revelation in which she views all the colors of the rainbow in everything around her at once. The narrative, in which a sequence of colors overlaps with a sequence of ages, is nicely conceived; it amounts to an extended metaphor: coming of age as the unfolding of a rainbow. Painting and seeing is the subject of the illustrations that accompany the text, which depict the narrator and Driscoll Lipscomb in a variety of colorful settings. At the same time, the illustrations themselves are the subject of the text: Meditative acrylics, glowing and thin, full of unconcealed brush strokes, they might well have been the actual pictures the artists of the story- -one budding, the other experienced—created. A glorious lot to look at, in a book in which seeing is paramount. (Picture book. 4-8)*justify no*