GET RED!

“Conceived and designed” by a three-person collective, this account of a child’s changing relationship with a moody crayon will certainly have viewers of all ages seeing red. Fresh out of the box, the young narrator’s crayon is friendly, boasting of all the red things in the world—but its disposition changes with its length, and by the end, it has to be coaxed out of hiding for its last hurrah, a school report on the Red Planet. Cheerfully disregarding the idea that a book’s design should not be intrusive, the members of 3CD place lines of text that looks hand-lettered and smaller explanatory captions across clipped or otherwise worked photos of a rooster’s head, baseball stitches, a stoplight, and other red items, all of which are decked out in intense, saturated color. Closer in spirit to Jane Wattenberg’s wild Henny Penny (2000) than the comparatively sedate color studies of Tana Hoban, or even Bruce McMillan, these super-closeup, almost incandescent images make nearly every turn of the page an occasion for startled chuckles. (Picture book. 5-8)