White Is for Blueberry

We loved this book. It totally exceeded expectations. Very imaginative and unexpected. Causes children to think and rethink. A favorite at reading time.

Other than that puzzling title, the book's cover doesn't even begin to hint at the clever premise of George Shannon's picture book. He wants to fool us, and kids love it when they think adults are wrong, or just trying to put one over on them. So you start to read: "PINK is for crow..." --and any child who has seen a crow knows this simply cannot be true. To increase the disbelief of the reader, Shannon obliges the reader with Laura Dronzek beautifully composed acrylic painting of a BLACK crow, right on the same page as his heretical proclamation. However, "White is for Blueberry" is a page turner. You'll want to see what colorful tricks Shannon and Dronzek are trying to put over on you. It turns out that pink COULD be for crow, because that's its color "when it has just hatched from its egg. Dronzek's big, cinematic close-ups of the hungry (yawning?) baby birds makes for a compelling argument. By this time, your toddler has become more curious about these seemingly false statements, and will want to see just how they can be true. "Green is for turnip..." Oh, really? But a big purplish turnip (framed in green) is right in front of my eyes! Aha...it IS green, "when we see it in the farmer's field." A family of bunnies, soft and smooth, munches away at the turnip's green leaves, the purple turnip barely visible beneath them. Each statement provokes the reader to disagree, or perhaps to try to figure out what Shannon will come up with next. While most won't get that "PURPLE is for snow...when the snow is the shadow of us" (and yes, that IS a poorly written line, the only one in the book), some might remember that fire CAN be blue...when it's "the fire at the tip of a [birthday] candlewick." ANd blueberries? A blueberry is white, "when the berry is still too young to pick. (Hence the bear on the cover, we see it walking through a blueberry (whiteberry?) smiling as it contemplates the goodies that await. Shannon neatly sums up the whole question of perspective and point of view, something that the egocentric child may just be exploring: "It all depends on when we look...how near or far... outside...or in." Your little one may very well be inspired (with your help, perhaps) to think of his or her own color surprises. I wish the book had concluded with an invitation to think of your own color paradoxes, or perhaps a quiz with answers in the back. After Shannon's "It all depends..." conclusion, all we get is a small picture of a crow with a half-eaten red and white apple in its beak. While this corresponds with the previous apple pictures that illustrated the idea to look both "outside" or "in," it's a somewhat pedestrian and anticlimactic way to finish a very creative, fresh book. It's a joy to look at, and it's a subtle reminder that there's more than one way to look at things and people.