THE WHITE BOOK

A cute child in a bowl cut goes wild with buckets of paint in this wordless book.

Using a roller, the child paints a white wall successively all-over magenta, blue, green, gray, yellow, purple, and orange. Just as Harold created a living environment with his purple crayon, in this book the act of painting the wall draws and brings to life a succession of animals, revealed in white crayoned outline as the paint covers the wall. On the magenta wall, birds appear, but they fly away. Fish materialize out of the blue wall, but similarly, they swim away. A stegosaurus snarls scarily from the green wall, and a huge elephant squishes the child into the corner of the gray wall. A tall giraffe on the yellow wall lifts the child by the back of the shirt, and a purple aardvark tries to steal the roller. Indefatigably, the young painter continues, and persistence is rewarded; a delightful puppy emerges from the orange wall. Finally: a friendly animal to play with. This simple, wordless narrative neatly expresses the theme of so many wordier and more convoluted picture books: if you keep trying, you can get what you want. Or, more simply, eventually you will find the friend who is the right size and wants to play with you.

A sweet celebration of the imagination and nifty validation of persistence.