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.

"Peas" of Cake! Little Green Peas: A Big Book of Color by Keith Baker

It had to happen! What comes more naturally for pods of little green goodness than teaching about colors? After all, it may be a drag for Kermit the Frog, but being green is easy-peasy for them.

But being peas-full little legumes, they let another color lead the way:

BLUE!

Blue boats, blue seas, blue flags...

And Little Green Peas.

The little green peas go down to the sea in ships, sailboats, surfboards, and rowboats in a duo of double-page spreads, the first spread featuring tall capital letters spelling out the word, set against a paler blue background of ocean waves, and the second spread showing the little green peas doing all the things they can do with blue, riding the waves, sunbathing, and digging for pea-root, er, pirate treasure on the beach.

Similarly featured are RED, in an autumn scene, YELLOW, featuring little peas climbing into their big yellow school bus, ORANGE, with balloons and pumpkins, as well as GREEN, PURPLE, SILVER, AND basic BLACK and WHITE. Fittingly, the green pages open with a double-page spread of a huge field of pea plant vines, leafy and oh-so-green, followed by platoon of big peas picking cute baby peas from their pods.  The silver pages feature a gray castle, with a Rapunzel-pea lowering her long locks, and for the adult reader, a wispy, silvery ghost on the parapet (an ap-pea-rition of Hamlet's father, p'haps?). Much visual humor abounds to keep little readers absorbed in each page with the antics of the busy little peas, not to mention the running gags--a paper airplane soars through the pages from beginning to end, and a little painter pea is discovered at his easel, hard at work on each not-quite-complete page.

Keith Baker's third concept book in this series, Little Green Peas: A Big Book of Colors (Beach Lane Books, 2014) offers an ap-pea-ling visual delight as it helps make learning this preschool skill a peas er,  piece of cake. School Library Journal's reviewer declares this newest a re-peat ap-pea-rance, starring this one and saying, "Simple in concept but elegant in design and execution, this title is a delight!"

Other books in this series are LMNO Peas (Classic Board Books), and 1-2-3 Peas (Classic Board Books) (Read my punny peas-ful reviews here!)