Outside the Box! The Crayons' Book of Colors by Drew Daywalt and Oliver Jeffers

CAN YOU NAME THE COLORS OF DUNCAN'S CRAYONS?

The ace duo of author Drew Daywalt and artist Oliver Jeffers returns, backed by the best-selling status of their first two books, to take their message of the sense, subtlety, and substance of colors down to the basics, in the persons of their droll personifications of Duncan's introductory box of eight.

But these eight are not exactly all the usual suspects. Duncan's box has the ever-popular RED, essential for strawberries, apples, Valentine hearts, and fire engines, for example, but there is also GRAY crayon, a bit worn down from coloring large animals--

RHINO, HIPPO, AND ELEPHANT...

(AND BABY PENGUIN.)

BLUE is in a mood indigo, whining a bit about his workload, worn down to a nub with the job assignment of coloring vast spaces of sky and water.

BEIGE bemoans his more-than-a-bit boring assignments, pretty much confined to rolling waves of wheat. WHITE blames all his problems on his background, whinging that when he does a white cat, it's invisible unless BLACK steps in to do the whiskers. And besides, GREEN always gets to do the real fun stuff--

DINOSAURS!! CROCODILES!!

As predicted, YELLOW and ORANGE still can't seem to get beyond their continual competition over who gets to color the sun. PINK complains that pink princesses are popular, which is all well and good, but that she secretly yearns to step outside the type-casting box and portray a monster! And PEACH is perpetually undecided, still searching for an inspiration to which to apply herself (outside the obvious fuzzy fruit, we assume.)

Jeffer's spindly lines and lively personifications, paired with Daywalt's straight-faced but witty prose, make for an intriguing and delightful way to introduce colors to tots with a bit of humor and verve, in their new board book collaboration, The Crayons' Book of Colors (Grosset and Dunlap, 2016), a different look at the life of crayons outside the box.

Daywalt's and the Caldecott-winning Jeffers' previous pairings include the picture book hits, The Day the Crayons Quit and The Day the Crayons Came Home.