Hailstones and Halibut Bones (Adventures in Color)
Grade 1 Up-- O'Neill's classic collection of 12 poems about colors (Doubleday, 1973) has been re-illustrated by John Wallner. Gone are Leonard Weisgard's elegant, evocative illustrations that were washed with the color explored in the poem. Instead, Wallner has created montages of each poem's images and colored them with various hues of the featured color. The results do complement the moods of the poems, but one must wonder why, in a set of poems celebrating color, all but three of the people shown are white. Poems such as "What is Brown?"--"Brown is as comfortable/ As love"--could create responses like Arnold Adoff's Black is Brown is Tan (Harper, 1973) . Instead, it is illustrated with three white children and two white men working. But after more than 25 years, the poems, like colors, still sing. "For colors dance/ And colors sing,/ And colors cry--/ Turn off the light/ And colors die." Kudos to Doubleday for letting Hailstones and Halibut Bones continue to live. --Kathleen Whalin, formerly at Public Library of Columbus and Franklin County, OhioCopyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.