It's like "Eraserhead" for kids. And that's good. | The Color Kittens (A Little Golden Book)

Childhood Favorite! | The Color Kittens (A Little Golden Book) | Margaret Wise Brown

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	• The Color Kittens (A Little Golden Book) Margaret Wise Brown Golden Books, 2003 - 24 pages average customer review:based on 34 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The Color Kittens

I ordered this book for my sister. We are both adults and we have very fond memories of having this book read to us as a children. I ordered it to her so she can enjoy reading it to her niece,nephews and futire children. Children of all ages love the story.

It's like "Eraserhead" for kids. And that's good.

This book is a hallucinogenic mind-freak that makes almost no sense at all--and it's great. My kids love it. I love it.

THE COLOR KITTENS is the story of two cats who paint. They live in a world in which all the colors apparently already exist, but yet they are the ones who have yet to make all the colors of the world. They don't, however, have any green paint, so there's no green in the world, but they really like green, because everything they already really like in the world is green. Their reality is a psychedelic and contradictory maelstrom of lyrical color, and then the cats have a long dream about color, and then they wake up and spill their paint, and then all their spilled paint goes out and gives color to the world which we saw..wait...didn't there world already have color...? Yeah, it did. What the...?

It's freaky, and it makes no sense at all, even internally, but it's really not about making sense or telling a coherent story--it's really about creating a world of vivid brightness, a world that connects from image to image in an associative, dreamlike way.

In that sense, this book is a lot like David Lynch's classic psycho-horror film, ERASERHEAD, in that it's more about mood and a dreamlike state than it is about progression or anything literal. It is, admittedly, much less creepy than ERASERHEAD, which is good, since it's supposed to be a kids book, and I don't want my kids to have nightmares. Like ERASERHEAD, however, the story, already very dreamlike, is interrupted and eclipsed by an actual dream, making the "reality" that bookends the dream seem all the more surreal, like something you were never really in and can never really return to. In ERASERHEAD, the main character goes from psychotic drudgery and responsibility, to having his head ground up into pencil erasers. In THE COLOR KITTENS, the cats who paint the world go from mixing paint to a tree that magically changes color when you count, and also to dancing easter eggs.

The book is lyrical, and delightfully weird, and almost biblical in its phrasing. "O wonderful kittens! O Brush! O Hush!" The illustrations aren't perhaps as memorable and trippy as Garth Williams' pictures in LITTLE FUR FAMILY, but they are good--simple and schizophrenic, straight off a Haight-Ashbury 1960s mural about the power of culturally diverse acts of community service.

I didn't like this book when I first read it to my daughter, but that's only because I'm an adult, indoctrinated by a lifetime of trying to make sense of everything. Once I read it from my three-year-old daughter's point of view, however, I could really see the appeal--the appeal of pure color and feeling, oddity and dream. It's a good book for kids in that way, because it's probably a lot like how most kids experience the world--not as a straight adult narrative, but as a wild wash of strangeness and the new.

If you have kids as young as two or three, pick this one up. They're sure to enjoy it, and you might find your mind stretched a bit from it as well. It's something else.

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Childhood Favorite!

This little gem, written by Margaret Wise Brown (of Goodnight, Moon fame) the same year I was born, was read to me as a child, and it was a favorite of my own (now grown)children. The combination of her poetic prose and the wonderful original illustrations are transporting. I bought a bunch so I would be sure to have them on hand for shower gifts (I couldn't find them for the longest time.) A wonderful, wonderful book.

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YEA The Color Kittens!!!

I absolutely LOVE this book! It's one of my childhood favorites, and I was excited to be able to replace it! The pictures are dream-like, and the book is great for introducing color concepts/words to young children. The book is so much fun; they'll read it over and over! I know I did! : D

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Once there were two color kittens with green eyes, Brush and Hush . . .So goes the rollicking tale of two pouncy kittens who make all the colors in the world. First published more than 50 years ago, this much-requested title is now available as a Little Golden Book Classic, with its original cover!

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