Monsters Love Colors: Mike Austin

Book: Monsters Love Colors
Author: Mike Austin
Pages: 40
Age Range: 3-6 

Mike Austin's Monsters Love Colors is a humorous introduction to color mixing in picture book format. The storyline is minimal, but the monsters are energetic and engaging. The book starts out with red, yellow, and blue monsters, each representing their own favorite color, and proclaiming reasons that they like that color.  Then a bunch of little gray monsters pop up, asking the first monsters to make new colors, like orange, green, and purple. The new colors are produced through much scribbling and mixing. At the end, there's even a rainbow. 

The text features a mix of declarative sentences and exclamations. Like this (across two page spreads):

"Monsters love to scribble, scribble, mix, dance, and wiggle!

Mix, mash, and splash! Squish, mish, and squash!
Squish! Squash! Mish! Mash!
Mash! Mish! Squish! Squash!"

The latter paragraph is accompanied by a picture of the yellow monster holding (mixing) two balls of paint, while the blue monster jumps up and down in a puddle composed of red, yellow, and blue. Three smaller gray monsters and a host of colored blots also dot the page. The text is in varied sizes, tilted at different angles, with the words from last two lines above fanning out from the color puddle. The monsters' excitement about color leaps from the page. They have huge grins pretty much all the time. 

There is a bit of rhyming, too. Like this:

"My favorite color is YELLOW!

Yellow is the color of PROWL!
and
HOWL!
and
GROWL! GROWL! GROWL!"

It doesn't make sense exactly (though their are pictures of a moon, flowers, and a lion that make more sense with the color scheme). But it's fun to read aloud, and good practice for rhyming.

I like the color mixing pages best, though. Like this:

"Dribble! Scribble! Mix, dance, and wiggle!

Mixing yellow and blue makes GREEN!"

The letters in "wiggle" wiggle about. The names of the colors are shown in the appropriate color. And the scribble of yellow and blue that is becoming green is messy and enthusiastic, just like something a kid would draw. 

With its crazy scribbles and plethora of exclamation points, Monsters Love Colors is probably not your best choice for bedtime reading. But as a read-aloud, or a book to read before settling in to do some finger painting, Monsters Love Colors shines. Recommended for preschoolers and kindergartners, ages 3 to 6. Monsters Love Colors is also a Baby Bookworm favorite. 

Publisher: HarperCollins (@HarperChildrens)
Publication Date: February 5, 2013
Source of Book: Review copy from the publisher

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