Children’s Books: Training the Eye and the Mind

For little ones, bold visual abstractions and simple juxtapositions engage the imagination.

By Meghan Cox Gurdon
Oct. 22, 2021 9:22 am ET

Three times, the picture book creator Laura Vaccaro Seeger has created meaning and serendipity from the permutations of a single nuance. First came “Green” in 2012, which considered the many shades and hues of that color. Then came “Blue” in 2018, which tracks the friendship and aging of a boy and his dog. Now comes “Red”, which tells of a lone fox set.

As in her previous color stories, our eye moves in “red” through thickly painted landscapes with small carvings framing color balls from other images. We meet the little fox, “dark red”, as it crosses a shady forest. We learn that the animal is lost, and see that it is also vulnerable in its contacts with the human world. At one point, the set borders an autumn field, disregarding the dangerous “rust-red” nails sprouting from a pile of old wood in the foreground. Our alarm leaves room for pity as the next born fox on the next side lifts the paw “blood red” from meeting the spikes.

There is a stronger sense of melancholy in “Red” than in the other two books in the informal trilogy; a result, Ms Seeger explains in a short afterword about her distress over the country’s political polarization. However, there is nothing political in the story, and thanks to a tender final reunion scene, children ages 3 to 7 will not be abandoned.