Customer Reviews

The Color Kittens (A Little Golden Book)

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2 star:		(1)
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This is a fantastic book, make no mistake; however, the reissue with this ISBN does not include all the original pages! By mistake we ordered a larger format edition for a friend's child and there are four or five more pages, presumably from the original edition. This is pretty important when the illustrations are by the Provensens. Seek the other edition (ISBN 0307102343)for more pages and great illustrations.

At Last! A reissue of this outstanding book, and most importantly, with the original illustrations! This book cleverly incorporates the concept of color mixing, but the lyrical verse and captivating pictures are what made it a part of our family's fabric. (our 4 adult children are now ages 35-45 and still remember every word) I had about given up ever finding it again. Our family copy, which is well over 30 years old, has been loved to loose paged pieces. This is just in time for our newest two year old grandchild, and I am getting multiple copies, JUST us case it disappears again! Oh wonderful kittens, oh Brush and Hush!

I can't believe I have finally found this wonderful book again. It was my absolute favorite as a child-I never got over those kittens! I was heartbroken not to have it for my older daughter and so pleased that I am able to get it for my second and third little girls. I am decorating their room by matting and framing the pages and will read it to them as much as they'll let me. Truly, it is a wonderful book for teaching kids about color mixing but the old fashioned illustrations are timeless and just so sweet. I am buying many copies: for us, our daughters' preschool, and to save for my granchildren-in case it ever goes away again. Why Good Night Moon and Run Away Bunny have staying power and the Color Kittens didn't is just beyond me. Buy it!

Kittens mixing paints to create every color in the world -- what a sweet image! This lovely book opens up the world of color for little kids, in a sweet and delightful way. I loved this book when I was small, and I am so glad to see that it is still available to kids of our next generation.

This is the first book I can recall reading all by myself. "The Color Kittens" brought me such joy that thirty years later I can still feel it. The illustrations are vivid in my memory. My son is thirteen months old and loves books. I am thrilled to have found "The Color Kittens" so we can share the experience again together.

I have the original Golden Book version (inherited from my husband's childhood library), and my 5 year old twins can't get enough of it. We've been reading it for two years now and it continues to fascinate. Why? The depth, creativity and originality--it is truly an "out of the box" book. The complexity of it far surpasses things like "Goodnight Moon," and even from an adult perspective, it is always compelling. Brown has done an amazing job of combining beautiful rhymes, technical details about how colors are mixed (my children are fascinated that three colors can make "all the colors of the world," the relationship between Brush and Hush, and imaginative flights of childhood fancy (easter eggs dancing around a tree and a counting exercise), all in one brief text. The depth in these few pages is astonishing. Note that I have not read the version that is currently available; it appears from another posting that edits have been made.

My four year old has memorized the singsong text of this book. We were very lucky to have found a reissue, with different illustrations and slight changes and omissions in the text. It's unfortunate that Golden Books won't reprint the original. So much better than Goodnight Moon or Runaway Bunny by the same author.

strawberry ice cream colours, kittens in mud, tumbledown green grassy lawns. a beautiful little book I haven't forgotten since last I saw it in childhood.

This book is a hallucinogenic mind-freak that makes almost no sense at all--and it's great. My kids love it. I love it.

THE COLOR KITTENS is the story of two cats who paint. They live in a world in which all the colors apparently already exist, but yet they are the ones who have yet to make all the colors of the world. They don't, however, have any green paint, so there's no green in the world, but they really like green, because everything they already really like in the world is green. Their reality is a psychedelic and contradictory maelstrom of lyrical color, and then the cats have a long dream about color, and then they wake up and spill their paint, and then all their spilled paint goes out and gives color to the world which we saw..wait...didn't there world already have color...? Yeah, it did. What the...?

It's freaky, and it makes no sense at all, even internally, but it's really not about making sense or telling a coherent story--it's really about creating a world of vivid brightness, a world that connects from image to image in an associative, dreamlike way.

In that sense, this book is a lot like David Lynch's classic psycho-horror film, ERASERHEAD, in that it's more about mood and a dreamlike state than it is about progression or anything literal. It is, admittedly, much less creepy than ERASERHEAD, which is good, since it's supposed to be a kids book, and I don't want my kids to have nightmares. Like ERASERHEAD, however, the story, already very dreamlike, is interrupted and eclipsed by an actual dream, making the "reality" that bookends the dream seem all the more surreal, like something you were never really in and can never really return to. In ERASERHEAD, the main character goes from psychotic drudgery and responsibility, to having his head ground up into pencil erasers. In THE COLOR KITTENS, the cats who paint the world go from mixing paint to a tree that magically changes color when you count, and also to dancing easter eggs.

The book is lyrical, and delightfully weird, and almost biblical in its phrasing. "O wonderful kittens! O Brush! O Hush!" The illustrations aren't perhaps as memorable and trippy as Garth Williams' pictures in LITTLE FUR FAMILY, but they are good--simple and schizophrenic, straight off a Haight-Ashbury 1960s mural about the power of culturally diverse acts of community service.

I didn't like this book when I first read it to my daughter, but that's only because I'm an adult, indoctrinated by a lifetime of trying to make sense of everything. Once I read it from my three-year-old daughter's point of view, however, I could really see the appeal--the appeal of pure color and feeling, oddity and dream. It's a good book for kids in that way, because it's probably a lot like how most kids experience the world--not as a straight adult narrative, but as a wild wash of strangeness and the new.

If you have kids as young as two or three, pick this one up. They're sure to enjoy it, and you might find your mind stretched a bit from it as well. It's something else.

My 4 1/2 yr old son says that this is his favorite book right now. I also remember having this read to me as a child. We've owned it now for a couple of years, and I never get tired of reading it over and over. Definitely one of our better children's book purchases.