Mark School, Baltimore, MDĬopyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. There is one tiny glitch: the text begins before the title page, which takes away from the natural flow. A concluding one-page summary of all the colors reminds children of what they have learned and how they can use the hues in their own world. And though readers are never quite sure where they are, in time and place, they are always somewhere delightful. This combination is a tough trick to pull off, yet it is done nicely here. The pacing, perfect for youngsters learning their colors, is achieved with repetition and rhyme, yet the detailed scenes are sure to encourage lingering. Each spread highlights a color as children are led on a fun-filled excursion by mice in old-fashioned costume. Brown's endearing style is unmistakable in lines like, "Black as trees, Black as ink Black as the night Where the dark moles think." In this previously unpublished book, the author's lyrical prose is paired with Krupinski's cuddly creatures. ReSchool-Grade 1-Young readers are led through a bright blue door into a fantastical world where color is everything. The author's fans may want to keep in mind her similarly themed The Color Kittens (1949), illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen and recently reissued. While the visuals demonstrate considerable polish, the writing is frequently rough ("purple as coal" "Green as the green/ Of the greenest fern/ Any rabbit has seen"), at least compared with the finely honed works Brown saw into print. For purple, the mice encounter a dapperly dressed Easter Bunny in the process of painting a large egg that is starting to hatch a single yellow eye, almost as big as the mice's heads, peers through the eggshell's widening crack. Her work offers a panoply of pleasing scenarios. As Krupinski takes on orange, for example, she sets the text within a large orange sun below, the mice paddle a teacup (white, but decorated with an orange motif) in water where fish jump and bumblebees balance on floating oranges that have fallen from nearby trees. The featured color dominates each extravagantly detailed full-bleed spread. Krupinski (who illustrated the posthumous Brown anthology Mouse of My Heart) treats brief rhymed verses about 11 colors to a series of lavish tableaux, creating a visual story line in which two mice a painter and his apprentice travel through a fantasy landscape to discover that the world is a palette of these hues.
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