My Cold Plum Lemon Pie Bluesy Mood

Writing in engaging free verse, Brown (Around Our Way on Neighbors' Day) follows the emotions of a boy named Jamie as he juggles his own pleasures with the demands of his family. As the title suggests, his moods are linked metaphorically to colors and foods. When his older brothers take over the sofa with their video game, Jamie's mood changes from a "Grape-juice drinking/ On the couch/ Bobbing to the beat kind of mood" to a "gray kind of place/ Storm brewing inside/ That I hide/ 'Cause I don't want any trouble space." Evans (We March) develops Jamie's character with care and attention, painting him singing into a homemade tennis-ball-and-toilet-paper-tube microphone, then streaking home from a basketball game to make it home by dark. It's valuable both for its believable exposition of Jamie's interior world and for its warm portrait of the life of a nonwhite family in which sharing is essential, rules are followed, conflicts are resolved, and meals ("Curry chicken!/ That's my piece!") are enjoyed together. Ages 4-up. Author's agent: Jennifer Rofe, Andrea Brown Literary Agency. Illustrator's agent: Rebecca Sherman, Writers House. (Mar.)

K-Gr 2--A boy describes each of the varying emotions he experiences in terms of color. Listening to music puts him in a purple kind of mood, while being evicted from the couch by his two bossy older brothers makes him feel gray. When his little sister asks him to draw a dragon, a gentle green feeling comes over him, which turns black when his siblings snatch the picture and tease: "Awww-it's cwayon time." The book could be paired with Dr. Seuss's My Many Colored Days (Knopf, 1996), which specifically discusses colors as they relate to moods, or Molly Bang's When Sophie Gets Angry, Really Really Angry (Scholastic, 1999), in which the palette reflects Sophie's changing emotions. Evans's digital collage illustrations, created with oil paints and graphite, effectively convey the mood/color correlation, although the shape of the children's mouths seems the same whether happy, sad, or angry.--Grace Oliff, Ann Blanche Smith School, Hillsdale, NJ