Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Favorite Fall Book

My favorite Fall book really focuses on the colors of all four seasons. Fall is devoted to the glories of brown. No color, other than orange (to my mind, linked more to Halloween) denotes the closing of the agrarian year with more resonance than brown. But I have never particularly liked brown. However, the way Joyce Sidman writes about brown in Red Sings from Treetops (a Caldecott Honor book in 2010), whimsically illustrated by Pamela Zagarenski, guarantees that I will never look at brown in the quite the same way again. Listen:

Brown,
fat and glossy,
rises in honking flocks.
Brown rustles and whispers underfoot.
Brown gleams in my hand:
a tiny round house,
dolloped with roof.


The last phrase, a powerful description of the promise of an acorn, is pure delight.

1 comment:

  1. Ooh, I love this book. I'll have to get it out and read the parts about autumn.

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