Red Sings from Treetops

A Year in Colors

written by Joyce Sidman
illustrated by Pamela Zagarenski

Children's book review by Steve Barancik

Ages 4-12

Poetry about the seasons

I firmly believe that children are our finest poets.

For one thing, they've not yet been trained to make conventional associations.

Ask an adult what dinner and a drive to the park have in common, and you're likely to be looked at like you're nuts. Whereas your toddler knows that both activities can involve someone locking you into your seat!

Limited, specialized vocabularies make for a lot of poetry too. What do the moon and snow have in common? They're both white. Hello!

Child poet Joyce Sidman focuses on color in this wonderful book about the seasons. The text substitutes colors for nouns and gives us a whole different (childlike?) way of looking at the world and the passing seasons.

What object do you think Sidman is writing about here?

Orange ripens in
full, heavy moons,
thick with pulp and seed.
Orange flickers,
all smoke and candles.
Orange eyes.
Orange cheeks.
Orange teeth.

(Did you guess pumpkin? You're right!)

Sidman has the perfect collaborator in illustrator Zagarenski, who earned a 2010 Caldecott Honor for her mixed media paintings on wood (with a little additional help from her computer) for this book. Her images are filled with pattern and, of course, color and in most cases feature a woman wearing a crown, along with her dog (also wearing a crown).

They revel in the natural world around them.

Red Sings from Treetops: A Year in Colors is a book about observation, about absorbing - not ignoring - one's surroundings. It's the perfect book to help children retain - and adults regain - their sense of poetry.

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