I'm sure other people do this. You have a big collection of kids books, but every time you go to the shelf it feels like you've read all of them five, ten, a hundred times before, and you're just ready for something new. You can go to the library and pick up new books there, but sometimes you'll just be walking through the book section at your local Target, and they'll have a big display of flashy looking, beautiful books, a lot of them with really big profiles, and I'll find myself scanning up and down deciding what new, totally random book I'm going to buy that I know absolutely nothing about.
For anybody who's done this before, you know it's very hit or miss. Sometimes you hit the lottery, sometimes you don't. You can kind of cheat, since a lot of these books are short enough that you can read them really quick in the store, or at least flip through the pages to get an idea, but that also defeats a little of the fun of the mystery of finding a new hit book. When you do find an absolute gem sitting there on the Target shelf, you bring it home, you open it up to your kids, it looks amazing. You start reading it and it is amazing. It's one of the better feelings for any parent reading a book to their kids, and you get that same sense of wonder the kids get, pausing after every page to really analyze all of the pictures. I think I've found at least five or ten books this way.
The Day the Crayons Quit is a major success story of random buying. It checks all of the boxes you'd expect: it has a very large profile, it has a lot of color on it, the title is drawn in crayon, and the idea of the day the crayons quit is really interesting just from reading the title. Even lightly flipping through it in the store, I knew this was going to be a major winner of a book.
Every crayon states its case
Reference Moth is maybe a bit jealous that this book is more colorful than her.
The basic premise: the crayons all write letters to a boy named Duncan, and all have their various complaints. Some of them are used too much, some are used too little, others are fighting with each other because they want to be a specific color for something like the sun. Each letter is very individual to the color being talked about. Red is complaining about overuse because of Duncan's love of fire trucks. Pink is complaining about underuse because she believes Duncan thinks it's a girls-only color. Yellow and orange are fighting over who gets to be the main color of the sun.
As the father of a fire truck kid... yes. Just yes.
I really hate to say it, orange, but I'm on team yellow here.
Every single time you flip the page to a new crayon, you wonder what this crayon's complaint is going to be, and the kids have that same anticipation. They're silly complaints too, ones that a kid listening will laugh at because they probably have a very similar experience when they are coloring. They might have their own favorite colors.
The page that I and Bookish Wife will laugh at 100% of the time that we read it.
Scribble, but really good scribble
One of the best parts of each page is that each letter is written in crayon in the color of the complaining crayon, with some supporting image alongside it. So we have the green crayon, who really likes being used for dinosaurs and crocodiles and trees but is also brokering the fight between yellow and orange, and we see actual crayon drawings of all the things he draws, along with maybe a little concern on his face while he talks about the fight.
All of these images look exactly as if they were drawn by a child, but they're also just really good at the same time. It's scribble, but the look of the dinosaur giving his thumbs up with a cute little smile is extremely appealing. The illustrations are some of the best I've seen in a children's book, which is super funny because it's impersonating a six or seven year old just scribble coloring with crayons, and somehow the execution is done so well.
The page nobody flips
The conclusion is that Duncan takes the advice of all the crayons and draws an incredible picture where he takes every single crayon's advice to make them all happy. We get a huge pink dinosaur for the sad pink crayon that doesn't get used, and a black rainbow for the black crayon who complained about never getting to be anything more than an outline.
If it's your first time reading, maybe for two minutes, three minutes, four minutes, you don't flip until you've gotten every little bit of detail and you've realized that, hey, Duncan did listen to his crayons and he's trying to make them happy.
I should actually time how long we end up spending on this page. Honestly, it could be 3+ minutes.
Two minor complaints, one involving a flashlight
Each crayon is given its own unique complaint and they are all hilarious, but if I had one minor critique of the writing, it's that they don't each have that different of a voice. The other complaint is definitely a very minor one. Sometimes when you're reading with kids at night the lighting isn't the best, and because each letter is written in the color of the crayon, some like black or gray are much easier to read on the page than others like yellow or orange. It's also not just typed-out letters; it's written as if somebody actually wrote it, and the handwriting mixes between some cursive letters and some normal letters. There have been times where I have to pause, squint my eyes just a bit, and try to figure out exactly what it is they're trying to say. It's never totally ruined a reading. It's usually something where if I pull this book off the shelf, I just remember to turn the lights on instead of using a flashlight under a blanket, like the kids might suggest.
Why this book is so great. Making white nearly invisible to help prove the point.
As a read-aloud it's a blast, and if you really get into it, you can do voices for each crayon (which of course I have, given how much I've read this). It's not a long read either, about seven and a half minutes in total. It definitely holds up on re-reads, because even though you know what's coming, it's still hilarious and the pictures are great to look at. Kid engagement is super high as well. It's the book that is guaranteed to get them to laugh, and the big huge profile of the book means they stay sitting down next to me, glued to the illustrations. They see these images as something they could draw themselves, and they see the complaints from the crayons and almost go, yeah, you know what, he has a point, maybe I should take that advice when I'm doing my coloring.
On message and values, there's really no moral to the story here necessarily, and I'd put it at a three out of five, but that's not really the point. The point of this book isn't that you should use your crayons fairly, even if it's what the crayons want; it's just a way to tell a funny story, and the kids aren't getting any hard lesson. That's what I love about this book. It's so enjoyable just to sit and look at. The crayons are funny, they all have valid complaints that really resonate with the reality of being a crayon of different colors, and it's done really well with both the writing and the illustrations. It's a book that I will take out any night, and I will even possibly do a sneaky exchange with another book that came out that I don't want to read. A clear Dad's Pick.
