RAINBOW COLORS

What personalities do colors project?

That’s the question Pearson answers in this interactive book, organized in ROYGBIV order, as a series of riddles. Each color first announces its dominant adjective. “I’m the loud one,” declares the first hue. Hints of the color’s identity accompany this assertion, in rhyming couplets: What connects cardinals, rubies, strawberry pies, apples, roses, and “elegant ties”? They are all red (at least, sometimes!). Are the items all “loud”? That’s debatable. Orange is “exciting,” yellow “cheerful,” green “lively,” blue “peaceful,” indigo “mysterious,” and violet “fancy”—again, up for discussion. Not every hint will be accessible to the target audience; some young readers will be stymied by references to “yarrow,” “peepers,” “lapis lazuli,” and “amethyst.” Fortunately, Chevalier’s illustrations ride to the rescue: On the page that reveals the hue in question, all the named color-bearers are depicted. The saturated, geometrically stylized, single-color illustrations render the hummingbird a solid violet, the pie crust a deep blue, and the butterflies an otherworldly orange. Among a slew of rainbow-themed books, this one gets back to the basics. It doesn’t explain what rainbows are or how they are formed; rather, it simply focuses on the characteristics that we might (or might not) associate with each hue, providing bright art to make the point.

An engaging look at colors—and the emotions they evoke.