ALA Booklist (Sun Oct 01 00:00:00 CDT 1995)

This may not be a book to re ead, but the central joke is clever the first time through, and children will want to share it as soon as they figure out what's happening. Set in the Old West, the story concerns certain strange phenomena: a blinding light that freezes whatever it touches and, when the light has passed, marks of greasy slime on horses, buildings, cattle, and even people in the frontier town and surrounding countryside. For most of the book, the artwork consists of bold, black outlines of figures on a white background, brightened in spots with loosely scribbled lines of color resembling a small child's crayoning. In the last few pages, the picture broadens into a shaded, full-color scene of a small child crayoning in a cowboy coloring book. Pair this with Elizabeth MacDonald's John's Picture (1990), in which the characters in a child's picture draw their own companions and setting. (Reviewed Oct. 15. 1995)

Horn Book (Tue Apr 01 00:00:00 CDT 2008)

As with the previous volumes, this book includes short rhyming stories to be read aloud by two voices, with the text color-coded for ease of use. The focus here is monsters and Halloween creatures. Despite the spooky title, Emberley's pencil, watercolor, and dry pastel illustrations play up the fun, not the frights, of the holiday.

Kirkus Reviews

Riverbend is a tiny town in the heart of the Wild West where nothing interesting ever happens. The town and its population are deftly drawn in black outlines on a white background. One day a driverless stagecoach rolls into town, its horses covered with ``great stripes of some kind of shiny, greasy slime.'' (Actually, they are red crayon squiggles.) The townsfolk are alarmed and the sheriff bravely rides off to find the driver; sure enough, he's covered with the same stuff. A posse is organized; when they come upon a stick-figure cowboy (in red crayon), they think he's the perpetrator and prepare to shoot him down. Just then, the action freezes: A realistically rendered, finely painted hand appears, holding a crayon, and doodles on them, too. The perspective changes, and readers see a little girl drawing in a book; on the last page, she exits the room, leaving The Cowboy Coloring Book behind. The danger facing all self-referential books is that the premise will overshadow its realization. But Van Allsburg's book is remarkably imaginative in its conception precisely because the premise is not only clever, but proves fertile in a completely unexpected way. Van Allsburg demonstrates in a self-conscious—and tempered—way what happens when two different drawing styles (coloring-book outlines, generally created by adults, and children's doodles) overlap, and when two genres (an entertaining Western adventure and a coloring book) meet. It's a book that starts with one point of view and steps into another. The average bildungsroman accomplishes this kind of transition in several hundred pages; Van Allsburg does it in 32, and leaves the flower of children's bookmaking blooming in the desert town of Riverbend. (Picture book. 2-8)"

Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

Van Allsburg cuts loose with this inventive spoof that will keep readers guessing right up to the end. Riverbend is """"the kind of place where one day was just like the rest,"""" and it looks it, too-a simple collection of block houses and buildings outlined in black and white. Color soon appears on the scene, however, in the form of scribbles-""""great stripes of some kind of shiny, greasy slime""""-that puzzle and alarm the residents of Riverbend. Sheriff Ned Hardy aims to put an end to the mystery, and rides out with a posse in search of the answer. Turns out he and his townsfolk are actually trapped in a coloring book, a fact readers discover as the point of view shifts, pulls back and reveals a crayon-wielding hand coloring the pages with glee. Van Allsburg clearly had fun with this one, and readers likely will too. All ages. (Oct.)

School Library Journal

K-Gr 3--In this fantastical Wild West story set in an actual coloring book, the quiet little town'' of Riverbend is mysteriously invaded by a slimy substance--crayon marks from a child's scribbles--that has the effect of stunning and paralyzing people and animals. Sheriff Ned Hardy and his men set out to get to the bottom of what has been terrorizing the town. In the end, they, too, are stopped in their tracks by the waxy slime as a child, armed with a full range of crayolas, is shown coloring in the last page of herCowboy Coloring Book.'' The illustrations of the town that readers see in the first pages are, appropriately, clean black-line drawings--not the rich, multidimensional illustrations usually associated with Van Allsburg's work. Like Jumanji (1981) and Ben's Dream (1982, both Houghton), this book's creative plot steps beyond the boundaries of reality, and because of its spare, coloring-book context, the artwork must also go beyond the artist's typical style. Larger collections will want to keep up with Van Allsburg's innovativeness, but this effort is pretty much a one-trick pony that most libraries can easily skip.--Christina Linz, Alachua County Library District, Gainesville, FL