When Queen Matilda summons individual colors, she can handle them. But collectively, "gentle" Blue, "bad mannered" Yellow, and "wild" Red create a disharmonious gray that brings her to tears. It's all pretty overwrought, but there's artistic ingenuity in the wordless, color-splattered latter pages. The final black-and-white image bears the omniscient narrator's unexpected overture, "Here you can do your own coloring. (c) Copyright 2014. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Hans Christian Andersen Medalist Bauer's witty meditation on color-first made as an animated short-stars Queen Matilda, a bossy, full-figured monarch prone to wild fits of emotion. She commands colors to appear ("Blue!" she yells); they're represented as fields of crayon scribbling, so clearly reproduced that they almost seem to have been applied to each copy by hand. The contrast between the crayoning and the bold, expressive black ink lines used for the queen creates pleasing tension as Matilda plays with Blue, then summons Red, who makes her feel "wild and dangerous." Violent, horse-shaped red scribbles carry Matilda on a wild ride; several overturned sheep and a broken clock tower trace Red's path of destruction. Yellow proves even more contentious, and the colors, now at odds with each other, turn to gray. Only the queen can restore order. Bauer does a remarkable job of imagining conflict and resolution with three crayons and a pen, concluding with pure joy as the queen dances with floods and showers of crayoned hues. Though the confines of the story are cozy, the range of emotion is epic. Ages 4-8. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.