Monday, December 10, 2007

Squiggles: A Really Giant Drawing and Painting Book


Squiggles: A Really Giant Drawing and Painting Book by Taro Gomi. 2007. Copy supplied by publisher, Chronicle Books.

It's About:

It's a coloring book.

The Good:

"It's a coloring book" really is not a good description. Because it's so much more than the inexpensive coloring books one usually finds, where you can color in Barbie or Dora.

Maybe I'm the only one who obsesses about how things feel? Because the pages of this book feel gorgeous; not the scratchy yellowy pages but smooth cream.

This is not a cheap coloring book. This is almost a work of art. You should buy two copies. The first one for the intended recipient, a child. But you'll take it home, and go to wrap it, and flip thru it, and you won't be able to stop yourself because you'll be thinking, "this is a coloring book for grown ups. This is a coloring book for me. Wow, I used to have so much fun with crayons..."

And after you follow a line across the page, with the invitation, "Let's play in the mountains," and you accept the invitation, and start to color -- you'll go, "uh oh. This was supposed to be for Cheetah." And you'll buy a second copy. Save yourself that extra trip to the store and just get two from the get-go.

To get a better "feel" for how this book looks and works, take a look at this excerpt, provided by the publisher.

Links:
Blog from the Windowsill review
Jen Robinson's Book Page review
whimsy review
in the pages review

1 comment:

Andromeda Jazmon said...

I got a copy of this too and I didn't let myself write in it at all. I was going to give it to my niece as a gift until I read Mary Lee's review at A Year of Reading. She suggested using it as a kind of class journal, letting the kids take it home and add a drawing one at a time. I got the idea of using it as a family journal. I'm going to have my kids draw in it on special occasions and keep a record of their growth.