Review by Booklist Review
Take four little gray monsters, introduce them to three bigger monsters who are bright blue, intense red, and shiny yellow, and your result is a joyously messy lesson in primary colors. The colorful monster trio keeps asking their gray friends the same question: What new favorite color can we make for you? Following each reply, the bigger monsters show how mixing two primary colors can result in the magic of a new color, and the gray monsters are thereby transformed. Taking a cue from the bigger beasts, the little ones splash around in the colors like kids splashing in puddles. They scribble with crayons and slop paints, and these wild bursts of color fill the book, both endorsing and giving an object lesson in coloring-outside-the-lines experimentation. The book ends in a several-page explosion of color until a rainbow appears to set things (sort of) straight again. About as much fun as monsters, or kids, can have learning their colors.--Fletcher, Connie Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Austin's (Countdown with Milo and Mouse) monsters-fuzzy, shapeless blobs with googly eyes and big smiles-look a lot like Muppets, and they're similarly loud and boisterous. They're equipped with crayons and paint, and they eagerly describe what they're doing ("Scribble! Scribble! Drip! Splash! Dribble!"). After messy opening scenes involving crayon-scrawling and paint-splashing, three primary-colored monsters announce their favorite colors (their own, of course). "Red is the color of roar! and snore! and more! more! more!" yells the red monster; the blue one gets so carried away, he starts to eat his favorite crayon. Next, the three give some smaller, gray monsters colors of their own. "What new favorite color can we make for you?" they ask. "Orange!" shouts one gray monster. The red and yellow monsters scribble frantically all over the gray monster ("Scribble, scribble, mix, dance, and wiggle! Mixing red and yellow makes orange!"), who emerges orange. Despite the friendly chaos, the pages retain a crisp, commercial look, with a glossy finish and mixed-media images that pop against backdrops of white. Whether children retain the ideas of color mixing, they'll be thoroughly entertained. Ages 4-8. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
PreS-K-Bloblike monsters in primary hues energetically scribble, mix, dance, wiggle, and otherwise enjoy playing with color. Each creature makes a statement about what its color stands for, without any particular logic: why red is the color of snore, yellow the color of growl, and blue the color of nibble are not explained. The primary colors offer to make new ones for some little gray monsters and produce orange, green, and purple in turn. On the final page, they pull together a rainbow, but while the colors are in the proper order in the word rainbow, the illustration shows red followed by yellow, not orange. Better books that describe the color-mixing process include Ellen Stoll Walsh's Mouse Paint (Harcourt, 1989) and Arnold Lobel's The Great Blueness and Other Predicaments (Harper & Row, 1968).-Grace Oliff, Ann Blanche Smith School, Hillsdale, NJ (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
Dribble! Scribble! Mix, dance, and wiggle!" A bevy of boldly colored monsters cavort with crayons and paint in primary colors and then blend them into new colors in order to give some drab gray monsters a new look. The color-mixing lesson is only thinly disguised, but preschoolers will still want to reach out and touch the effervescent, splattered mixed-media illustrations. (c) Copyright 2013. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Dynamic monsters cavort and shriek and play with color. These monsters have googly eyes, big cartoon grins and unthreateningly rounded bodies. At the beginning, some are a single primary color, while others are smaller and gray. One red monster, one yellow monster and one blue monster extol the virtues of their own colors with jubilant chantability if not strict logic: "Red is the color of ROAR! and SNORE! and more! more! MORE!"; "Yellow is the color of PROWL! and HOWL! and GROWL! GROWL! GROWL!"; "Blue is the color of Scribble and Dribble and Nibble Nibble Nibble." Other verses are more hit-or-miss--for example, one page tries to rhyme "splash" with "squash," which may cause a stumble for adults reading aloud. However, all the monsters gyrate and boogie with exuberance, and their mixing of colors has exciting results. The small gray monsters become secondary colors, and one lucky little fellow who requests "SUPER tropical MEGA monster RAINBOW swirl with raspberry on TOP!" gets multicolored stripes and a rainbow parade to lead. Austin's squiggly, untamed swirls of crayon, pencil and ink and the high energy in his casual style (complete with silliness: "Hey! Don't eat your crayons, silly monster!") may coax even the bounciest little monsters to sit down for storytime--and run for the crayons and poster paper afterwards. Groovy. (Picture book. 2-5)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
