The Black Book of Colors - Menena Cottin

Illustrator: Rosana Faria
Tranlated by Elisa Amado
Both author and illustrator are from Venezuela
For: Any and all
Publilshed: 2006
Rating: 5
Read: October, 2008, many times
Endpapers; Black - as they should be.

What an incredible premise. A picture book written to be touched. Black as a-night-with-no-moon pages. Short white font in the lower left is all we SEE. The rest we have to feel.

Above the one-sentence of text is the sentence written in braille. And then, the entire facing page is a raised illustration...an illustration to be touched. "Thomas says that yellow tastes like mustard, but is as soft as a baby chick's feathers." Fliuffy feathers float across the facing page, lovely to see when you can get the light just right, and SO difficult for the unaccustomed, desensitised fingers to feel. "Red is sour like unripe strawberries and as sweet as watermelon. It hurts when he finds it on his scraped knee." A huge, plump strawberry attached to its vine, with two smaller strawberries as well. "Brown crunches under his feel like fall leaves. Sometimes it smells like chocolate, and other times it stinks."

The last page is the braille alphabet. I cannot feel these dots. It all feels the same to me. How do people do it? This is one of the most thought-provoking picture books I've read in a long time.