The Blue Thing [Paperback]

Daniel Manus Pinkwater (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Prentice Hall (1977)
• ASIN: B000OHYQG8
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

More About the Author

Daniel Pinkwater lives with his wife, the illustrator and novelist Jill Pinkwater, and several dogs and cats in a very old farmhouse in New York's Hudson River Valley.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Sky's the Limit!, July 5, 2008

By 

M. Allen Greenbaum (California) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Blue Thing (Library Binding)

"The Blue Thing" has the powerful appeal of archetypal tales with names like "How the Rhino Got Its Horn," but it relies more on visuals than text. Like many of the best children's books, it features clear, simple sentences and unadorned illustrations.

It all beings with a blue "thing" -- a "very small" round ball-shaped thing set against line drawings of a river and mountains. The blue thing's identity is a mystery, and for a long time it just stays hidden. Even when a frog and a wolf hop/walk right by it, and "nobody knew it was there."

After the winter snows, however, that blue thing has a tremendous growth streak! In a series of beautiful line drawings, we see it grow larger by leaps and bounds: As big as that frog and wolf, then as big as a cow, a tree, a house, a town, and a mountain, "and it was getting bigger."

"Everyone could seee it, and everyone wonderer what it was." IT's not until that last page that your young audience (young toddler throughearly elemenatary) can see what that little blue thing grew into (even though the word "sky" is never mentioned--only pictured). Pinkwater's typical understated words close this deceptively simple, but emormously clever book: "And it is still there. You can go and see for yourself.