The Other Colors: An ABC Book by Valerie Gates
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I was surprised by this one, ready for it to be a dull take on the compulsory genre.
But Gates and Cutting were witty in both words and visuals (my favorites were the 'razzamatazz' [pink] rattlesnake, and the xanadu xiphosuran!). Gates is a graphic designer and drew strange color names from a career of fiddling around in Illustrator and Photoshop. There's a nice color guide online where you can see not only these, but also find other odd color names by fiddling with the tools: http://colors.findthedata.org/
The alliterating one-line text was engaging largely because of its repetition of the grammatical pattern. This gave each page roughly the same rhythm, give or take a beat. Alliteration was a good choice, because it allowed the alphabet letters to get more air time than they get in the usual one-word label ABC.
This joins a tradition of 'parody' alphabet books, where the didactic standard is used as a post-modern reference for messing around. Wildly different from [b:The Gashlycrumb Tinies|47558|The Gashlycrumb Tinies (The Vinegar Works, #1)|Edward Gorey|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1327933644s/47558.jpg|3211551], but in exactly the same playful tradition!
Flaws: They couldn't find anything but 'yellow' for letter Y--not really an 'other' color, is it? Some of the visuals felt more forced, like the U page.
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