The Day the Crayons Quit

Here the prolific Oliver Jeffers provides the pictures for Drew Daywalt’s humorous account of the disenchantment of a young artist’s crayons. Their unhappiness is expressed in a series of letters to Duncan, their owner. Each letter is written in their own colour and a suitably young hand and accompanied by a Jeffers child-impersonating illustration on the opposing page demonstrating the nature of the crayons’ complaint about how Duncan uses them. Some don’t like his lack of imagination. Red is fed up with being used for strawberries, apples, fire engines and Father Christmas. Others don’t like the fact that Duncan doesn’t always crayon within the lines. And there are some crayon rivalries: fashion conscious light brown would rather be called beige and doesn’t like playing second fiddle to ‘Mr Brown Crayon.’ It’s great fun and cleverly executed. The pedantic reader might protest that the crayons, however discontented, haven’t actually quit, although if Duncan doesn’t do something quick to placate them, they very well might. The idea should capture children’s imaginations and make them think not only about how they use colour but possibly about some of the other unexamined conventional assumptions in their lives: and, yes, the pink crayon does protest about being underused by Duncan.