THIS IS ORANGE

A most unusual portrait of the color orange.

Poliquin’s epic journey opens, naturally, with an orange. Fast facts and anecdotes follow; though presented seemingly randomly, they coalesce into a rich exploration of the color through the lenses of culture, history, and nature. The rooster from The Canterbury Tales, “dreaming of a fox whose ‘colour was betwixe yellow and reed,’” precedes a spread about how oranges originated in India and southern China, accompanied by an illustration of the fruits traveling to Europe. Next, the author tracks the evolution of the word orange from the Tamil word naru, which means “fragrant.” The tidbits in this quirky “field trip” bounce around, referencing Mark Rothko’s painting Orange and Yellow, the “International Orange” of American astronauts’ space suits, the orange T-shirts Canadian youngsters wear annually to remember Indigenous children sent to government schools, Buddhist monks’ robes, monarch butterflies, and marigolds in an Indian market. The coda to this tale culminates in a page of color theory, with Morstad providing a painterly palette of variations on the hue. Her artwork, relying on watercolor, chalk pastel, and digital rendering, has a vintage, painterly feel that visually binds this series of postcardlike vignettes. Poliquin’s charmingly conversational prose is rife with asides that betray the author’s genuine enthusiasm for her subject (“This mineral is called crocoite. Isn’t it magnificently orange?”); readers will eagerly heed her advice to “find orange in your world.”

Witty, smart, and sophisticated.