colors + flavors

by Jill Hartley

Like the previous two books I've found by this author/photographer, colors + flavors is a simple collection of brightly colored pictures around a common theme. In this case, it happens to be fruit. Only the cover image shows a kid actually eating the fruit- all the interior pages just show the fruit itself, each one usually pictured as a whole next to a sliced-open portion to show the insides. All the pictures have bold-colored backgrounds or plates that compliment the colors of the foods nicely.

A lot of the fruits were unfamiliar to me. The ones in the book I know well were bananas and plantains, strawberries, mango, avocado, watermelon, peach, nectarine, grape, plum, orange, lime and pineapple. I have never eaten but did recognize the figs, pomegranate and star fruit. There were seven other fruits I could not identify at all. I think some were cactus fruit and am guessing one was a papaya but the others have no idea. Which made it fun to look at the pictures the fourteenth (or whatever) time in a row my kid pulled this book off the shelf, as I kept musing on the identity of the unfamiliar ones.

Rating: 3/5 ......... 24 pages, 2008