Have you ever imagined that you were a favorite color? And if you were green, yellow, blue, or red, what would you be? A leaf on a tree? A sun? The sky? A racing car?
Prolific children’s author Karla Kuskin takes off on just such an imaginative flight of fancy in her book Green as a Bean. Accompanied by whimsical, colorful illustrations by artist Melissa Iwai, this delightful book helps young listeners and readers enter such imaginative questions.
If you could be green/would you be a lawn/or a lean green bean/and the stalk it’s on? is the question that introduces the book. My little girl chortles as she looks over the lovely and comical illustrations of little children tucked up fast asleep in the pods of green beans. This book had her from page one and never let go.
And I didn’t have to ask the questions twice. They invite children to pretend, not just in the typical sense ("Would you like to be a ballerina? A fireman?") but in an unusually imaginative and sometimes downright silly way. When Kuskin poses the question If you could be red..., for instance, she doesn’t just add would you be a car/that races the wind/or jam in a jar (though those are fun choices) but adds or an acrobat’s tights with a hole in the knee?
Besides colors, the book invites children to contemplate what else they might be if they were square, soft, loud, small, and fierce – all things children love to be at one time or another!
I had never heard of Karla Kuskin before this book, but apparently she’s a well-known children’s poet and author who has been writing for many years. Based on this terrific book, and the hit it’s been with my four year old daughter, I plan to seek out more of her work.
Besides the imaginative fun, I was most impressed by this book’s sophisticated use of rhyme. Kuskin’s couplets sometimes use enjambment (the breaking of a phrase or thought at the end of a line) as when she writes, in my favorite section: If you could be bright/would you be the sun/or a starry night/or a thousand and one/fireflies flying/and flickering free? At the end of each section of questions, she reinforces the invitation for little ones by adding another kind of clever rhyming line that always begins Tell me... In this particular case, the invitation is Tell me, quite bright one, what would you be?
I love books that help children to imagine, to think, to ponder questions, and this one has definitely helped my daughter do that. She loves for each of us: herself, her Daddy, and me, to choose what we "would be" – though she likes it when we each choose something different. (In case you’re wondering, from examples I’ve given thus far: I would be a bean...because my daughter took my first choice of a leaf...and I would be jam in a jar, and a starry night.)
The copyright of the text for Green as a Bean is 1960, 2007, but Melissa Iwai’s charming illustrations are only copyrighted 2007, so this book was reissued in a new edition with new illustrations. That proves the text has some staying power if publishers wanted it visually refreshed for a new generation. And the charming, often funny illustrations, awash with warm colors, bring the rhymes to life. A little round-faced boy with round glasses is featured prominently in many of the illustrations, "becoming" the various things we’re imagining, or looking on at the imagined things. He makes a very fierce tiger, and looks especially daring and mischievous on the back of a dragon!
One final note: I found this book while diving in the Epinions database as part of rkingfish’s database dive write-off. Thanks to this write-off, I discovered a book my daughter loves and a whole new children’s author whose work I can explore! Proof positive that when you dive deep, sometimes you come up with treasure!
~befus, 2007
Green as a Bean
by Karla Kuskin, illustrated by Melissa Iwai
Laura Geringer Books (imprint of HarperCollins)
006075334X
copyright 2007 (with these illustrations; book first published under the title "Square as a House" in 1960)
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