I love this illustrator! The author and illustrator use color in a wonderful combination.

This book is fun to look at and read about the seasons in their different colors. And which way each color is put into every season! ( )

This is yet another beautiful story with special illustrations by Pamela Zagarenski. Since discovering Zagarenski through the first book I read of hers, I am on a quest to read all books containing her illustrations.

It is difficult to describe Zagarenski's illustrations. To use a trite phrase, "You have to see them to believe them!"

I read this book to my six year old neighbor, Andres, whom I am tutoring with the hope that he will learn to love books at an early age -- just as I did. The team of Joyce Sidman and Pamela Zagarenski is a winning one. This is not the first book they have published together.

The illustrations and writing take us through a world of the colors of seasons. While it may sound boring, and certainly this mode was used in other books, none can be as wonderful as this one! ( )

Red Sings from Treetops: A Year in Colors is a book of poetry, unrhymed free-verse on the four seasons by Joyce Sidman. This is illustrator Pamela Zagarenski's first recognition as a Caldecott Honor Book. She used mixed-media paintings on wood, and computer illustration.

Zagarenski clarifies Sidman's sometimes-vague imagery for children. For example, "Red squirms on the road after rain" are earthworms. "In spring, Yellow and Purple hold hands. They beam at each other with bright velvet faces. First flowers, first friends" are pansies. "And here, in secret places, peeps Pink: hairless, featherless, the color of new things" are baby birds. In summer, "Red darts, jags, hovers; a blur of wings, a secret throat" are hummingbirds, while "Red whispers along my finger with little beetle feet" are ladybugs. "In the summer night, Gray waits by the porch light, sticky webbed toes against window screens, belly pale and soft. Such a long tongue" is a frog. In fall, "Brown gleams in my hand: a tiny round house, dolloped with roof" is an acorn. "Red swells on branches bent low: Red: crisp, juicy, crunch!" are apples. "Orange ripens in full, heavy moons, thick with pulp and seed" are pumpkins. "White whispers, floats, clumps, traces its wet finger on branches and stumps" is snow.

In these ways, Zagarenski's illustrations are integral to the book, but I found her people, with their large conical clothing and their crowns (and the crowned dog), very distracting. ( )

I love the beautiful pictures depicting nature. Also, the poetic manner of combining nature with colors is extremely lovely. Can be used to teach kids about the seasons or colors. Or for older children, it would be a good way to introduce a poetry unit. ( )

This Caldecott Honor book is a great way to read kids into Autumn. Students from first to third grade are good audiences for the poetic descriptions of the colors of the seasons. The fanciful images of the boy and his dog give the journey a fairytale-like feel with a realistic setting. Color is the main feature that the author focuses on. ( )