All About Color

by Elizabeth Rusch, Elizabeth Goss (Illustrator)

Overview

A fresh picture book of simple but surprising exploration of the art, science, and emotion of color. This mindful meditation encourages children to see the world differently.

Colors don’t exist. The sky is not blue. The grass is not green. A violet is not even violet. But color still plays an important role in our lives. Color can be a signal, as in a traffic light. It can be a call for help, like a life jacket. It can help us stand out or blend in, or feel like part of a team. Colors even affect our mood: red can make us angry, blue can make us sad, and yellow can brighten our day. Young readers will never look at color the same way again.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781632893246
Publisher:	Charlesbridge
Publication date:	03/26/2024
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	32
File size:	31 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

Elizabeth Rusch is the author of All About Nothing and more than two dozen award-winning children’s books, including A Day with No Crayons, Zee Grows a Tree, Volcano Rising, and Mario and the Hole in the Sky, winner of the AAAS/Subaru Prize for Excellence in Science Books, the Green Earth Book Award, the Cook Prize, and the Golden Kite Award.

Elizabeth Goss is an illustrator, author, and papercutter. Her picture book My Way West: Real Kids Traveling the Oregon and California Trails won the Paterson Prize for Books for Young People. A proud member of the Guild of American Papercutters, Elizabeth teaches art workshops across the Pacific Northwest and loves welcoming students of all ages into the world of papercutting.
www.lizabethgoss.com

Editorial Reviews

2024-01-05
A meditation on the nature of color and some of its meanings.

“Color doesn’t exist,” Rusch writes. “The sky is not blue. The grass is not green. A violet is not even violet.” The point she’s making is that colors are just reflected light and our brains all perceive hues differently, but she doesn’t get around to explaining that, or any of her equally cryptic ensuing pronouncements about colors, until an afterword in small type that few befuddled young readers will be inclined to tackle. In flat, cut-paper illustrations that resemble screen prints, Goss struggles to provide clarifying examples for terse claims that colors provide signals and warnings, help us to stand out, somehow “make” us see red or feel blue, and can even “color your whole life!” An all-too-close image of a black widow spider’s red marking is the stuff of nightmares, and elsewhere two children who looked angry (depicted in hues of bright red) and then sad (“blue”) on previous spreads unconvincingly “brighten” their day on a page dominated by yellow in which they hug. Depicting a diverse cast of children, the art culminates with several kids gathering to “color” art projects, if not their lives, in a busy studio in which the creators’ likewise confusing All About Nothing (2023) is prominently on display.

Ambitious but underdeveloped and bewildering. (Informational picture book. 6-8)

Kirkus Reviews