My Favorite Color: I Can Only Pick One?

by Aaron Becker, Aaron Becker (Illustrator)

Overview

The Caldecott Honor–winning creator of the Journey trilogy celebrates color and nature with a joyously simple die-cut book.

People always ask for your favorite color. But who said you can only have one? Open this gorgeous board book to find an ode to ever-changing colors, offering a spectrum of hues evoking the sun, the sea, clouds, and dew-dappled fruit. In colorful grids of small squares—some translucent inserts, some painted on the page—Aaron Becker uses layering to make colors shift and transition from spread to mesmerizing spread. As fun to look at as an alluring paint-chip display and as inspiring as an artful concept book can be, My Favorite Color promises to be a favorite, well-thumbed read and a prized art object in itself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781536214741
Publisher:	Candlewick Press
Publication date:	09/08/2020
Pages:	16
Sales rank:	441,112
Product dimensions:	8.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

Aaron Becker is the Caldecott Honor–winning author-illustrator of the Journey trilogy and of A Stone for Sascha, as well as You Are Light, the acclaimed companion book to My Favorite Color. His favorite color is bluish-green. And reddish-orange. And also yellow. He lives in western Massachusetts with his family.

Editorial Reviews

The engineers behind 2019’s wondrous You Are Light return with another innovative approach to color primers...The basic premise—picking your favorite color—is enough to engage any toddler or preschool audience, but the mind-boggling depth of beauty and bookmaking ingenuity puts this offering on another level.
—Booklist (starred review)

In this exuberant follow-up to his outstanding You Are Light (2019), Becker returns to the glorious medium of translucent vinyl inserts that allow colors to shine and meld...The sturdy translucent inserts work together magnificently, layering to create an unexpected richness of color. No matter what your favorite color, this rainbow ode is sure to brighten your day.
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

By the end, there are various shades from different color families on the same pages (“And the dew-dappled colors of sweet, ripe fruits”), and eventually the narrator admits defeat: “I can only have one favorite color? Hmm…Impossible!” Equally impossible, for many viewers, will be picking a “favorite” in this eye-catching and mind-expanding color concept book.
—The Horn Book

Which hue is best? Die-cut holes filled with a rainbow assortment of translucent squares let kids choose.
—People

From the Publisher

★ 2020-07-28
A lively rumination on the merits of different colors—and can one ever pick a favorite?

In this exuberant follow-up to his outstanding You Are Light (2019), Becker returns to the glorious medium of translucent vinyl inserts that allow colors to shine and meld. Based on a discussion about favorite colors, this board book is less poetically sweeping than its predecessor. Yet the topic of what color reigns supreme is a perennial favorite among the preschool crowd, making this nicely accessible for young audiences. Starting with the premise that “my favorite color is yellow,” a white page shows 25 differently tinted sunny yellow squares. On the following page, the narrator muses that it’s really “yellow, like the sun in a clear blue sky” and various blues are sprinkled about the gold and cream swatches. The narrator simply must then amend their favorite color to blue. As the book discusses the best parts of all the rainbow colors, there’s an ultimate conclusion. Choosing a favorite color? “Impossible!” Lyrical musings such as “ripples on an emerald sea” or the black-backgrounded “purple hues of night” create vivid verbal images that bring the colorful squares to life. The sturdy translucent inserts work together magnificently, layering to create an unexpected richness of color.

No matter what your favorite color, this rainbow ode is sure to brighten your day. (Board book. 2-4)

Kirkus Reviews