Your True Colors: They Say Blue by Jillian Tamaki

THEY SAY BLUE IS THE COLOR OF THE SKY,
WHICH IS TRUE TODAY.

A girl goes out under blue skies, skies clearly blue, but accented with a flock of blackbirds.

But is it always blue?

THEY SAY THE SEA IS BLUE, TOO.
BUT WHEN I HOLD IT IN MY HAND,
IT'S CLEAR AS GLASS.

When a child goes forth, there are many things to wonder about. The girl wonders if blue whales are really blue. She's never seen a one (although as she takes a swim in the sea, there is one beneath her, unseen, a dark shape beneath the dark blue waters). And as she moves through the landscape, what she sees seems to morph in front of her eyes. The sea of grass in the field seems like an ocean she could sail upon, but it is not what she imagines it to be.

IT'S JUST PLAIN OLD YELLOW GRASS.

But then the girl marvels at a flower and spots a tree, and she's off again in a vivid fantasy of herself becoming a tree, with spreading limbs and fingers changing to leaves.

As the poet Walt Whitman wrote, "There was a child went forth every day. And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became...." Caldecott Honor winner, (for her This One Summer, Jillian Tamaki's They Say Blue (Abrams, 2018) is a picture essay upon that theme. With ink-line drawings set off by gorgeous swirls of colors, both cool blues and greens and and warm reds and golds, as the child blends with the seasonal changes in the landscapes around her and returns at last to her room, anchored, full-circle, by the blue of the coverlet on her bed, where her mother braids her hair as dark crows wheel through the red of the setting sun. This is a quiet book for thoughtful moments of pondering our outer and inner worlds. School Library Journal stars this one and says, "Attuned to a child's psychology and patterns of critical thinking, this visually stunning work is a must-purchase for libraries."