CAT'S COLORS

A cat walks through a gray landscape, collecting colors for a surprise project.

Cat sits on a stretch of medium-gray ground, licking her paw. Gray clouds containing neat spiral patterns hover calmly above her. Cat’s activities are supposedly “gray-day things,” but she sports a tiny smile. Suddenly she opens her eyes wide: it’s time to “collect some colors.” Traversing her landscape, she observes green leaves on a tree; immediately afterward, a green spot appears on her white coat. Next, she breathes in “the red smell of roses,” and a red spot joins the green one. As Cat collects colored splotches on her fur, the backgrounds stay gray—save for Cat’s fur and its increasing colored dots, everything is gray except each spread’s featured hue. The final color she collects is yellow, from the moon, and then she disappears into a tall stand of upright gray leaves for the night. “Cat?” asks the text at dawn, trying to coax her into sight. She doesn’t emerge, but readers get a close-up view inside the bush: there’s Cat, stretched blissfully across the spread, nursing a rainbow of kittens. Each is a color that Cat collected the night before. Anderson’s gray world is warm and softly textured—despite the spectrum of lovely surprise kittens, gray has a day in the sun here too.

Gentle and charming.