[As promised, most Calling Caldecott posts this season will begin with the Horn Book Magazine review of the featured book and then segue into the post's author's critique.—MVP]

I'm excited to start the season with a nonfiction picture book. It's a truism at this point, but the days of serviceable, generic illustration in picture-book NF are long gone. There are a number of nonfiction titles on the CC to-do list this year, all worthy of Caldecott consideration.

The subject of this book is the color blue, which is not only a color but also an emotion, and a value, which means that the illustrations must do a lot. Daniel Minter's art meets the challenge. 

Minter previously earned a Caldecott Honor for Going Down Home with Daddy, by Kelly Starling Lyons — a very different book, but with similar use of watercolor washes and the incorporation of symbols and patterns.

With this book's text referencing the sky and sea, I appreciate that Minter begins with double-page spreads in which the color blue predominates. These opening pictures serve to immerse the reader in the subject (and indeed we see children floating in the sky). But as the text delves into how rare it was to find blue in nature, historically, and how difficult it was for humans to produce the color, Minter steps away from those blue-saturated pages, introducing other colors, highlighting how very rare blue was. As the text takes us through the history of blue, Minter provides a through line with the inclusion of patterns — on clothing; to represent the rays of the sun, the continents, even chemical bonds; to convey emotion. 

The most powerful illustration (for me) is the one reviewer Laura Koenig refers to above about the cruelty of the indigo trade. On the previous spread the text says, "Indigo became so precious, people spent it like money." So readers are set up for the impact when they turn the page to see a double-page expanse of red fields and yellow sky, with the people toiling in the field the only objects in the illustration colored a deep indigo blue. Minter VISUALLY shows readers how a person reaping indigo was literally equated with money; less human than commodity.

I hope some of you have had the chance to see Blue. If you were serving on the current Caldecott committee, what arguments might you be making in its favor, or otherwise? I see a bit of a tonal change in the book's later pages, notably on the spread that discusses blue as a value. The art seems a bit flatter, less complex (though I do appreciate the fact that the blue ribbon's recipient is a young Black girl who has won first prize at her science fair) — do you think that shift works? And for those without the book in front of you, what were your overall impressions?