COLORING THE RAINBOW

An old man asks a little boy to imagine kids creating the colors of the rainbow in Rose’s picture book.

The pair sit together on a park bench under a tree, and the man tells a story about another boy and his trombone. The child happily plays alone, but one day, a sweet, high-pitched sound wafts through his window, melding with his low notes and creating a new sound. The boy, inspired, takes his trombone out into his brownstone-lined neighborhood. First, he meets a girl with a piccolo. As they play music together, neighborhood children join in with a bagpipe, French horns, guitars, and a clarinet. Dale’s colorful illustrations show diverse kids with various skin tones playing in harmony, including a girl in a wheelchair with a Korean janggu drum. As they enter a park, their notes magically create different colored ribbons that rise to form a rainbow. The narration is arranged in evenly metered ABCB rhyming quatrains, and the singsong effect evokes the story’s musical theme. Rose introduces the metaphor of different instruments’ sounds representing each child’s voice early on: “This beautiful voice, / a new instrument’s sound, / moved the boy to declare: / ‘Every voice must be found!’” However, the central story stands well on its own without the framing of the old man’s retelling.

A well-told tale of the magic of making music.