With an artist's eye, Paschkis explores individual colors on a series of double-page spreads, each offering a large illustration, a light poem, and a few short lines of commentary revealing some aspect of science, history, common expressions, cultural differences, or emotional connotations as it relates to that hue. One entry celebrates the "zillion" words for red, while the note reveals the ancient (and still used) sources of red pigment for paint: rust and cochineal insects. On the blue spread, the text notes that this most popular color is also associated with sadness. In the accompanying illustration, a sorrowful, blue bear sits atop a hill. Blueberries spill, rolling down from the pail he's evidently dropped, while the accompanying verse reads, "Oh, what did I do? / Blue-hoo, / Blue-hoo!" While the verse is somewhat uneven, most of the poems are enjoyable, and so are the brief, varied informational notes. The many lively large-scale images in the gouache paintings pull the individual entries together into a satisfying whole, while the jacket image is both inviting and expressive.

Fourteen color poems pair with vibrant gouache illustrations; each spread also includes background information about the color. The last poem is, naturally, about a rainbow, depicted as a sequence of images of different-colored foods ("a rainbow picnic") set on squares of their matching colors. An author's note does a good job explaining color theory, differentiating between pigments and the perception of light as color.

Poems and eclectic tidbits about colors.Although it maintains a superficially traditional approach of highlighting one hue per spread—sort of! sometimes!—this quirky colorfest is anything but standard. Free-spirited poems follow no particular structure: "Loudly, rowdy / daffodils yell hello. / Hot yellow" is the short, tongue-twisty first. A blue bear mourns spilled blueberries in patter that begs participation: "Oh, what did I do? / Blue-hoo, / Blue-hoo!" A verdant expanse exudes warmth and the "Green smell of a summer lawn. / Damp dawn long gone." A second green poem features a hilarious dragon-and-ogre food chain; equally funny, a paintbrush-holding cat offers the esoteric terms "alizarin," "cadmium," and "quinacridone" to a dog in overalls, who responds, pithily, "Red." Paschkis' gouache-on-paper illustrations are elegant, playful, and expressively variable from page to page—each spread displays a new style and mood, including a wavy, all-encompassing ocean, a sad, slightly eerie minimalist forest, and a sated pig reclining on a hillside after a mouthwatering picnic. Across from the poems sit informational tidbits: etymology of "green" from "grene" and "growan"; the more yellow plants a chicken eats, the deeper yellow their eggs' yolks are; where dye comes from. Hardcore science, including light refraction, will float over many readers' heads, but there is no harm done. The assertion that the "Himba tribe of Namibia still has no word for orange" verges on exoticization and, unfortunately, is located on a spread with monkeys.Full to bursting, juicy, never jammed. (author's note) (Picture book/poetry. 3-7)