BooksForKidsBlog

Friday, January 24, 2020

Make Way for Gray! This Book Is Gray by Lindsay Ward

Gray Crayon has something to say.

They never let me color.

He plans his own book. He's got the right characters--a wolf, a kitten, and a hippo.

The three live a grayt life in a charming gray house beside a gray ocean under a gray and overcast sky. But the colored crayons are instant critics. Red says Gray's landscape is gloomy. Yellow says it is depressing. Blue just looks sad.

The Primary Colors stick together. Yellow raises her sunglasses to complain the lack of sunshine and points out that there's bound to be a lack of greens in Gray's diet.
"What are these animals going to eat? It won't be organic," she says.

"I'm guessing the kitten!" adds Red.

The Secondary Colors pile on, moaning about Gray's monochromatic palette.

Orange opines loudly, asking who muted Gray's hue. But Gray is adamant!
"Achromatics have feeling, too, ya know!"

And he is not without support. White and Black appear and have their say on the side of Gray. White even delivers a sudden snowstorm. It's a whiteout, and new critters--a gray elephant, walrus, whale, raccoon, gibbon, and rhino appear to join the snowball fray.

And the snowy background makes Gray a standout, a way to have his say.

It's a colorful display with all the colors in play, in Lindsay Ward's creative new book about colors, This Book Is Gray (Two Lions, 2019),  in which it's agreed that all colors are cool--and as for Gray and his quiet color friends? They live grayly, secure in their jobs of creating background and contrast, shade and hue, ever after. Says Booklist, “This book is a fun introduction to color theory that may inspire children to use more gray in their artwork and remind them to include friends who are left out.”

Fans of Drew Daywalt's hit crayon caper, The Day the Crayons Quit will want to share this one with Marie Lamba's A Day So Gray, (see review here).

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