Color Me Loving You! LOVE from the Crayons by Drew Daywalt

LOVE is every color.

Valentine hearts are always RED, but love can be a silly PINK dinosaur, or it can be a hard-to-see WHITE cat. (in the snow!)

Love is YELLOW and ORANGE,

because love is sunny and warm.

Love can be BLUE as a stormy rain cloud.

Love is BROWN,
because sometimes love stinks.

It can even be BLACK!

Love is hard to describe, but in Drew Daywalt's new Valentine's day special, Love from the Crayons (Penguin, 2019), the crayons remind us that love has many colors and many ways. Illustrator Oliver Jeffers reunites all the colors of the crayon box (see all the books here) to share in this unusual Valentine's Day book for folks of all ages.

Deck The Walls! The Crayons Christmas by Drew Daywalt

One snowy December Day, Duncan was making Christmas cards with his crayons.

The mailman rings with a Christmas card, but it's not for Duncan. It's from Mom and it's for her favorite crayon, Peachie Pie, with some snazzy punch-out dresses for Peachie to try on.

What's going on? It's a snow storm of Christmas cards to all his crayons-- perfectly browned cookies for Beige Crayon, a banana for change of pace for a snowman's nose just for Yellow Crayon, a box of bright-colored punch-out ornaments for the Christmas tree, a Hanukkah card with a dreidel for Gray Crayon, and one addressed to TODDLER CRAYON in big letters.

There is even a surprise pop-up Christmas tree, in Drew Daywalt's holiday gift to their young fans, The Crayons' Christmas (Penguin Workshop, 2019), offering young readers the fun of opening a Christmas card on each page, with real letters and games inside for kids to open and enjoy. It's a delightful holiday toy-and-movable book, with the familiar drawings of noted artist Oliver Jeffers, done (of course) in crayon. This one is a special gift for fans that comes already "wrapped" for Christmas giving.

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.

Class Homecoming The Day the Crayons Came Back by Drew Daywalt

Remember the thrill of opening that new deluxe box of crayons, with names of colors you never knew existed? Remember those perfect points and clean wrappers? Remember trying to choose between Tomato Red, Fire Engine Red, or Brick Red? Remember the sadness when the first one got broken? Did you ever wonder what happened to all those pristine crayons?

But those days are in the past for Duncan since that calamitous day, The Day the Crayons Quit. Who knew crayons were such a bunch of rivalrous prima donnas?

Still, Duncan has moved on. Those days of solving quarrels between persnickety crayons are all behind him--or so he thought, until he started to get postcards and letters from the long scattered gang. The first one, from a scarcely remembered color, came in the a short note.

Dear Duncan,
Not sure if you remember me--Maroon Crayon? You only colored with me once, to draw a scab. You lost me two years ago in the couch and your dad sat on me and broke me in half.
           --M.C.

Soon the cards and letters are pouring in. One comes from the Ritz Motel.

Dear Duncan,
No one likes peas. Or anything pea green.
I'm off to see the world. I'm changing my name.
Sincerely,
Esteban (The Crayon Formerly Known as Pea Green)

Hi, Duncan!
It's me, Neon Red Crayon. Remember the great vacation with your family? Remember dropping me in the pool when you left? Clearly you do not, because I'm still there!
--Your left-behind friend, Neon Red Crayon

And then there's one that leaves Duncan slightly nauseated.

Dear Duncan,
I'm sure you wouldn't recognize me after the horrors I have been through. Have you ever been eaten by a dog and puked up on the living room rug? And Duncan, it's not pretty at all. I'm more carpet fuzz than crayon.
--Your Indigestible Friend, Tan (or possibly Burnt Sienna) Crayon

One by one the missing crayons report in--Glow-in-The-Dark Crayon, missing since Halloween, Turquoise, left in Duncan's pocket and melted to an unfortunate sock with him in the dryer, and Big, Chunky Toddler Crayon, with the point bitten off by Duncan's baby brother, who, as BCC pointedly pronounces, is no Picasso! The gang's mostly all home, except for one, that is. Esteban's last post card reports that he's done globe-trotting, but not sure how long before he will arrive back.

"There ARE pyramids in New Jersey, right?

It's hard to top yourself, but Drew Daywalt's and Oliver Jeffers' sequel to their best-selling opener, The Day the Crayons Came Home is a red-letter (Neon Red, that is) winner, a book that kids and any adults lucky enough to get to read aloud will want to repeat often. With slyly sophisticated wit, augmented by the award-winning Oliver Jeffers'creations, anthropomorphic crayons, each one a comic character in its own right, this one is one of those once-in-a-blue moon picture books that every kid should share. "A masterwork of humor and design," says School Library Journal's starred review.