My Cold Plum Lemon Pie Bluesy Mood

K-Gr 2—A boy describes each of the varying emotions he experiences in terms of color. Listening to music puts him in a purple kind of mood, while being evicted from the couch by his two bossy older brothers makes him feel gray. When his little sister asks him to draw a dragon, a gentle green feeling comes over him, which turns black when his siblings snatch the picture and tease: "Awww-it's cwayon time." The book could be paired with Dr. Seuss's My Many Colored Days (Knopf, 1996), which specifically discusses colors as they relate to moods, or Molly Bang's When Sophie Gets Angry, Really Really Angry (Scholastic, 1999), in which the palette reflects Sophie's changing emotions. Evans's digital collage illustrations, created with oil paints and graphite, effectively convey the mood/color correlation, although the shape of the children's mouths seems the same whether happy, sad, or angry.—Grace Oliff, Ann Blanche Smith School, Hillsdale, NJ