A Blue So Blue - Hardcover

Dumont, Jean-Francois; Bourque, Michel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1402721390 ISBN 13: 9781402721397

Publisher: Union Square Kids, 2005

Synopsis

Winner of the 2004 Prix Saint-Exupéry, an award given yearly to the best illustrated picture book in France by the family of The Little Prince author, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry .

In the big gray city,
Lived a little boy who never played...

With A Blue So Blue, Jean-François Dumont has created an outstanding picture book that will dazzle the eye, stir the imagination, and warm the heart. The exquisitely written tale whisks children off of a fantastic journey across land and sea. Every page features breathtaking paintings, rich in color and detail. It is simply a magical tour de force of illustration and storytelling.
The adventure begins with a little boy's marvelous dream of a perfect blue, a blue both soft and strong, a blue so blue you want to curl up inside it. Armed with a paintbrush, he travels the globe in search of this special color--from a famous art gallery to a mid-Atlantic fishing boat, from a remote blues club in the Mississippi Delta to a sun-drenched desert with a purple sky--only to realize that what he was looking for was right in his very own home after all.

About this title

From School Library Journal:

Grade 1-4–A boy who loves to draw starts dreaming about a certain blue: "A blue so blue, it was both dark and bright./A blue so blue, it was always just right." One morning, the memory of it is so strong that he sets off in search of it. He starts at a museum, and, when he doesn't find it, the guard suggests that he look in the Big Blue Sea. This begins a quest that takes him all over the world, from the South Sea to a blues club in the U.S. to the Blue Men in the African desert, until his search ends back at home. The writing, while lacking the concise nature of true poetry, is poetic in structure and occasionally rhymed; the story is more a thoughtful tale than a dramatic one. The paintings are the real stars in this book, which won the Prix Saint-Exupéry, an illustration award given in France where it was first published. With dynamic compositions, a great sense of place, and vibrant and beautiful colors, Blue is a visual delight. While this probably won't have wide appeal, artistic kids (and their parents) will appreciate its look and its message.–Lauralyn Persson, Wilmette Public Library, IL
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist:

Gr. 1-3. The winner of the 2004 Prix Saint-Exupery, an award given annually for the best illustrated French children's book, is a tale about love, art, and inspiration. In language that is rhythmic and lyrical, the book introduces a boy who loves to paint the color blue, but he can't seem to recover the hue he sees in his dreams. He takes a bus to the art museum, the train to the ocean, a ship to the tropics. In each case, he touches his brush to the blue he finds, but it's never right. He goes up the Mississippi and hears the blues, both sweet and sad; he heads for the desert, where he touches the blue turban of a chief, who tells him what he searches for "may never have been far away." Then the boy remembers his mother and finds the blue he was searching for in her eyes. Complex both in its language and in the richly painted illustrations, this makes for an evocative yet gentle book. The endpapers give 18 samples of kinds of blue. GraceAnne DeCandido
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Union Square Kids
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1402721390
• ISBN 13: 9781402721397
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 24