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This Is Orange: A Field Trip Through Color
"A tour de force through world history, the natural world, and cultural studies." —School Library Journal (starred review)
Prepare your senses for a delicious shock of orange in all its glory and variety—in a playful color tribute destined to wow art and design enthusiasts of all ages.
Look closely. The color orange is all around you, not only in the natural world—from fruit and foxes to minerals and mushrooms—but in the human-engineered world, too, from works of art to religious ceremonies to astronaut survival suits. Ranging through time and circumnavigating the globe, witty stream-of-consciousness text and jaunty illustrations explore color through surprising social, historical, cultural, and artistic lenses. With more than thirty vivid examples and a gentle introduction to color theory, this eye-opening voyage into the heart of orange is a clever appeal to experience other colors—and the world at large—with an open and expansive mind.
Prepare your senses for a delicious shock of orange in all its glory and variety—in a playful color tribute destined to wow art and design enthusiasts of all ages.
Look closely. The color orange is all around you, not only in the natural world—from fruit and foxes to minerals and mushrooms—but in the human-engineered world, too, from works of art to religious ceremonies to astronaut survival suits. Ranging through time and circumnavigating the globe, witty stream-of-consciousness text and jaunty illustrations explore color through surprising social, historical, cultural, and artistic lenses. With more than thirty vivid examples and a gentle introduction to color theory, this eye-opening voyage into the heart of orange is a clever appeal to experience other colors—and the world at large—with an open and expansive mind.
48 pages, Hardcover
Published October 21, 2025
1 person is currently reading
87 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
November 30, 2025
A celebration of the color Orange. The cover is immediately arresting, both delicious and powerful. With marbled, creamsicle end papers, an otherworldly, scribbly cantaloupe, monarchs flying from the pages carrying the souls of loved ones, and a colored pencil spread that deserves to be framed, the illustrations alone carry the celebration, history, and importance of the color orange. There's nothing special about the text, but this tiny book delivers a punch. From the linguistic journey of the word Orange to the roles Orange has played in defining itself, art, culture, history, literature, architecture, religion etc. There's nothing untouched by Orange. I'm ready for Poliquin and Morstad to write about the rest of the colors!
October 19, 2025
I think this is a very interesting children's book about the color orange and the naming of the color orange. I, as an adult, have learned from this book which is often the case with adults reading children's books.
Illustrations present various nuances of the color orange beautifully bringing life to the information set forth on these stark and brilliant pages. Things I learned....
600 years ago there was no word for "the colour betwixe yelow and reed." (from The Canterbury Tales)
The birthplace of oranges (the fruit) is India and China.
The word "orange" is derived from a word in several languages for fragrant - narange - eventually dropping the "n."
The Golden Gate Bridge (San Francisco, CA, USA) is painted "International Orange" to aid in its being seen in the famous San Francisco fogs.
A range of other information on how shades of orange are used, the cultural meaning or the color, and/or where it is seen all around the world is very interesting. Certainly, the color "betwixe yelow and reed" has brought invigorating joy to our visual world.
Quite an interesting book. A good choice for libraries.
I received a complimentary copy to facilitate a review. Opinions are mine, alone and are freely given.
Illustrations present various nuances of the color orange beautifully bringing life to the information set forth on these stark and brilliant pages. Things I learned....
600 years ago there was no word for "the colour betwixe yelow and reed." (from The Canterbury Tales)
The birthplace of oranges (the fruit) is India and China.
The word "orange" is derived from a word in several languages for fragrant - narange - eventually dropping the "n."
The Golden Gate Bridge (San Francisco, CA, USA) is painted "International Orange" to aid in its being seen in the famous San Francisco fogs.
A range of other information on how shades of orange are used, the cultural meaning or the color, and/or where it is seen all around the world is very interesting. Certainly, the color "betwixe yelow and reed" has brought invigorating joy to our visual world.
Quite an interesting book. A good choice for libraries.
I received a complimentary copy to facilitate a review. Opinions are mine, alone and are freely given.
July 10, 2025
Sometimes I swear it feels like half my life is spent justifying why I like one children’s book or another. This is particularly true when it comes to nonfiction. Humans (American humans) love to categorize our literature. It isn’t enough for a book to simply BE, it has to serve some kind of a larger purpose (this is true of fiction as well, but at least they get to snuggle sweetly into their genres and then do whatever they want in there). And recently we’ve seen some very nice books about color and hues coming out. The most notable of these was undeniably Blue: A History of the Color as Deep as the Sea and as Wide as the Sky by Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond, which didn’t just talk about the color but tied its very origins and being into a consideration of indigo’s role in the slave trade. Steven Weinberg’s What Is Color? is definitely for the slightly older readers, but it too does a marvelous (and fun!) job of linking each color’s discovery, recovery, and creation into larger themes. Into this mix we find This Is Orange and I was intrigued to discover that its press materials discuss it as “a gentle introduction to color theory.” Ah! That’ll do! After all, at its core, the thing you’d primarily say about this book is that it’s beautiful from tip to tail. A marvelous international encapsulation of orange’s name, origins, and ways in which it’s been seen and used in many parts of the globe. Kids will just like it. Make your justifications for purchase however you may.
Orange. From a very young age children are taught that to get it, all you have to do is mix red and yellow together. Yet the story behind orange is something worth considering. From the fruit’s early existence in Indian and Southern China to the various (and poisonous) ways humans have tried to capture it, it has flourished worldwide. These days your associations with orange could be as common as a Halloween pumpkin, as exciting as an astronaut’s survival suit, or as striking as Christo’s Central Park installment. Now look around you. What orange things do you see?
I keep bringing up the press materials for this book, which is a bit gauche, but I’m always interested in how a publisher like Candlewick chooses to sell something as esoteric as a color. In their bio of Rachel Poliquin, they describe her as “an award-winning writer well known for her visionary approach to nonfiction”. This is a reference to such books as her thoroughly incredible Superpower Field Guides (which I sometimes feel like I'm a one-woman promotion team for) and The Museum of Odd Body Leftovers (great tilte). I like that. “Visionary approach”. It’s a fancy way of saying, “She likes to do the weird stuff that they aren’t necessarily going to teach in school.”. Not that I can’t envision a teacher dedicating a day to orange. It may not show up on the MAP testing, but if I’ve learned anything from the single-color books for kids I’ve read, it’s that when you take as broad a subject as an entire hue, you have an opportunity to use it to speak to something even greater. Poliquin gets it.
The key to figuring out why This Is Orange works as well as it does lies in looking at how its author chose to arrange it. She starts off with the titular fruit. This broadens slightly to other orange fruits, and then to the origins of the name of the color itself. Now at this point, a lot of other books would then keep everything Europe-focused. They’d talk about the rooster from The Canterbury Tales and how France called the fruit the “narange” and Margaret Tudor’s orange sleeves. And Poliquin does all that, sure, but look closer. The Canterbury Tales mention (where a rooster thinks of a fox whose “colour was betwixe yellow and reed”) is immediately followed by a map of orange trees traveling from India and southern China. That explanation of the French name of “narange” is prefaced by all its earlier iterations, staring with the Tamil word “naru” meaning “fragrant” and moving on to Old Persian and beyond. And that mention of Margaret’s sleeves then goes into how ancient artists would grind the crystals of realgar to make arsenic orange. Throughout the book it works like this, and the end result is that yes, the references that North Americans would get are plentiful, but they’re constantly peppered with other areas of the globe where orange is key. The turmeric robes of Buddhist monks. The monarchs and marigolds of Día de Muertos celebrations. Even, and perhaps most impressively, the orange shirts Canadian schoolchildren wear on September 30th to honor the 150,000 First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children sent forcibly to government schools.
To that last point, there are some complex elements and moments included in the book that require further explanation on the part of the parent/teacher. Backmatter? Not a thing. Which I get, but is still a bit of a pity. I can’t guarantee that every adult that encounters some of these facts will know enough to answer their children’s questions, and it would have been nice if there had even been two pages of abbreviated explanations about some of these facts (like, why do they sell so many marigolds in the Mullick Ghat flower market in India?).
I like to play little “what if?” games with my books. Example: What if Julie Morstad hadn’t been selected as the artist on this title? Would I like it half as much? It would be a different book, certainly, though Poliquin’s skills would elevate any illustration she was paired alongside. But Morstad… she’s special. Special to me in particular. In 2012 I saw my first Morstad art in a board book adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Swing. Instantly I was enchanted. It was like someone had taken Gyo Fujikawa’s sensibility and tweaked it into something a little richer and deeper. Over the years, watching Morstad’s style grow, change, adapt, but always remain unavoidably “her”, has been a joy. In this book she’s presented with the issue of having to highlight various concepts and ideas apart from one another. Sometimes she handled doing this with the standard object-against-white-background, but not always. Then, as the book progresses, she’s able to open herself up to landscapes or rich dark Halloween trick-or-treat nights. There’s a steadiness to all this. It’s a simplification, but she’s essentially the children’s illustration equivalent of Wes Anderson. There will always been a hint of stillness at the core of everything she does. And for a book about a color, that’s an asset.
I had this moment when I came to the end of this book that I’ve been thinking seriously about ever since. The last two sentences in the book read, “Now it is time for you to find orange in your world. If you look carefully, you will see orange almost everywhere.” I was just reading the book in my work’s lunchroom but I did as it said. I stopped. I looked around me. And lo and behold it was right! Orange! Orange in plain sight on hanging staff newsletters, hidden on bottles in the kitchen, found on signs, and pretty much everywhere. I would have thought it wasn’t as common a color as all that, but this book gave me, even for a brief moment, a kind of clarity and wonder. It opened my eyes to what is obvious but also difficult to see. And if it can do that for a grown adult, imagine what it can do for kids! This Is Orange’s sheer appreciation for orange itself shines through both word and image. The subtitle is spot on. This is a field trip through one color, and like every good field trip it leaves you seeing your world with new eyes once you’re done. Beautiful and necessary.
Orange. From a very young age children are taught that to get it, all you have to do is mix red and yellow together. Yet the story behind orange is something worth considering. From the fruit’s early existence in Indian and Southern China to the various (and poisonous) ways humans have tried to capture it, it has flourished worldwide. These days your associations with orange could be as common as a Halloween pumpkin, as exciting as an astronaut’s survival suit, or as striking as Christo’s Central Park installment. Now look around you. What orange things do you see?
I keep bringing up the press materials for this book, which is a bit gauche, but I’m always interested in how a publisher like Candlewick chooses to sell something as esoteric as a color. In their bio of Rachel Poliquin, they describe her as “an award-winning writer well known for her visionary approach to nonfiction”. This is a reference to such books as her thoroughly incredible Superpower Field Guides (which I sometimes feel like I'm a one-woman promotion team for) and The Museum of Odd Body Leftovers (great tilte). I like that. “Visionary approach”. It’s a fancy way of saying, “She likes to do the weird stuff that they aren’t necessarily going to teach in school.”. Not that I can’t envision a teacher dedicating a day to orange. It may not show up on the MAP testing, but if I’ve learned anything from the single-color books for kids I’ve read, it’s that when you take as broad a subject as an entire hue, you have an opportunity to use it to speak to something even greater. Poliquin gets it.
The key to figuring out why This Is Orange works as well as it does lies in looking at how its author chose to arrange it. She starts off with the titular fruit. This broadens slightly to other orange fruits, and then to the origins of the name of the color itself. Now at this point, a lot of other books would then keep everything Europe-focused. They’d talk about the rooster from The Canterbury Tales and how France called the fruit the “narange” and Margaret Tudor’s orange sleeves. And Poliquin does all that, sure, but look closer. The Canterbury Tales mention (where a rooster thinks of a fox whose “colour was betwixe yellow and reed”) is immediately followed by a map of orange trees traveling from India and southern China. That explanation of the French name of “narange” is prefaced by all its earlier iterations, staring with the Tamil word “naru” meaning “fragrant” and moving on to Old Persian and beyond. And that mention of Margaret’s sleeves then goes into how ancient artists would grind the crystals of realgar to make arsenic orange. Throughout the book it works like this, and the end result is that yes, the references that North Americans would get are plentiful, but they’re constantly peppered with other areas of the globe where orange is key. The turmeric robes of Buddhist monks. The monarchs and marigolds of Día de Muertos celebrations. Even, and perhaps most impressively, the orange shirts Canadian schoolchildren wear on September 30th to honor the 150,000 First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children sent forcibly to government schools.
To that last point, there are some complex elements and moments included in the book that require further explanation on the part of the parent/teacher. Backmatter? Not a thing. Which I get, but is still a bit of a pity. I can’t guarantee that every adult that encounters some of these facts will know enough to answer their children’s questions, and it would have been nice if there had even been two pages of abbreviated explanations about some of these facts (like, why do they sell so many marigolds in the Mullick Ghat flower market in India?).
I like to play little “what if?” games with my books. Example: What if Julie Morstad hadn’t been selected as the artist on this title? Would I like it half as much? It would be a different book, certainly, though Poliquin’s skills would elevate any illustration she was paired alongside. But Morstad… she’s special. Special to me in particular. In 2012 I saw my first Morstad art in a board book adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Swing. Instantly I was enchanted. It was like someone had taken Gyo Fujikawa’s sensibility and tweaked it into something a little richer and deeper. Over the years, watching Morstad’s style grow, change, adapt, but always remain unavoidably “her”, has been a joy. In this book she’s presented with the issue of having to highlight various concepts and ideas apart from one another. Sometimes she handled doing this with the standard object-against-white-background, but not always. Then, as the book progresses, she’s able to open herself up to landscapes or rich dark Halloween trick-or-treat nights. There’s a steadiness to all this. It’s a simplification, but she’s essentially the children’s illustration equivalent of Wes Anderson. There will always been a hint of stillness at the core of everything she does. And for a book about a color, that’s an asset.
I had this moment when I came to the end of this book that I’ve been thinking seriously about ever since. The last two sentences in the book read, “Now it is time for you to find orange in your world. If you look carefully, you will see orange almost everywhere.” I was just reading the book in my work’s lunchroom but I did as it said. I stopped. I looked around me. And lo and behold it was right! Orange! Orange in plain sight on hanging staff newsletters, hidden on bottles in the kitchen, found on signs, and pretty much everywhere. I would have thought it wasn’t as common a color as all that, but this book gave me, even for a brief moment, a kind of clarity and wonder. It opened my eyes to what is obvious but also difficult to see. And if it can do that for a grown adult, imagine what it can do for kids! This Is Orange’s sheer appreciation for orange itself shines through both word and image. The subtitle is spot on. This is a field trip through one color, and like every good field trip it leaves you seeing your world with new eyes once you’re done. Beautiful and necessary.
October 20, 2025
A “field trip” might be one way to describe it, but in combination with Julie Morstad’s vibrant watercolor & pastel illustrations, where shades of apricot and calendula feel like they’ve been taken fresh from the paint palette, an “adventure” through color feels more like it.
Feel free to check out the rest of my review at: https://butlerspantry.org/2025/10/16/...
Feel free to check out the rest of my review at: https://butlerspantry.org/2025/10/16/...
July 19, 2025
EARC provided by Edelweiss Plus
Wow- this is so much more than just your typical color book. It’s full of details that prompt further questions. I don’t often read books twice, but this one I did. I hope it’s a start to a forthcoming series!
Wow- this is so much more than just your typical color book. It’s full of details that prompt further questions. I don’t often read books twice, but this one I did. I hope it’s a start to a forthcoming series!
November 11, 2025
Which came first, Poliquin wonders, the color or the orange? This intriguing exploration of orangeness opens by asking us to consider an existential question: does a color exist before it’s named? Every visual element in this beautiful book works together to advance this exploration, starting with the swirling, marbleized, orange endpapers that precede the giant facsimile of a very famous fruit, perched atop an Ionic column. Of course, the color existed before we decided to name it, but was referred to in the Canterbury Tales as “betwixe yellow and reed.” The fruit, Poliquin explains, supplied the name for the color, as she then traces its entomology from Asia to Europe. Examples of orange in artwork comes next: a rendering of a 1502 painting of Margaret Tudor (the first time orange was used in English to describe a color), the glowing Orange and Yellow by Mark Rothko as observed by a boy with brown skin, and a double page spread showing Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 2005 Central Park installation, The Gates. Poliquin casts her investigation widely, investigating orangeness in Mexico (as part of Dia de Muertos) and India (marigolds as part of Diwali decorations) before closing with a glimpse of 8 different flags with orange components. She delves into the color orange as it appears in nature—especially among birds—and in human-made hues such as International Orange, seen on spacesuits and the Golden Gate Bridge. She also reflects on the orange robes of Buddhist monks and the wings of monarch butterflies, all conveyed through a lilting, inquisitive first-person narration and brought to life by Morstad’s stunningly stylized watercolor and pastel illustrations.The text and artwork perfectly complement each other, both sophisticated and slightly arch, but full of admiring wonder. This unique combination of art, science, linguistics, and whimsy made me stop and think about the naming of things and to look anew for this gorgeous color in my own (luckily autumnal) surroundings. Link to complete review: https://ysbookreviews.wordpress.com/2...
November 10, 2025
Copy provided by Young Adult Books Central
Do you know a young reader whose favorite color is orange? They'll be thrilled to see this detailed history of this color and its name. I had no idea that until about 600 years ago, there was no word in English for the color between yellow and red! This exploration tracks the distribution of the orange fruit, its various names, and how these evolved for "narang" into "orange". There are also discussions of different types of orange paint, from arsenic orange to chromium orange made with lead. Famous artworks, like Rothko's Orange and Yellow or Christo and Jeanne-Calude's orange fabric in Central Park are profiled , and even fruits and cheese get explained. It makes sense that spacesuits are orange so that they stand out against blue sky and water.
The pictures show the wide variety of orange items nicely, and have plenty of detail. Most of the time, the text is black on white, but there are a few pages where it is on dark pages in shades just a bit lighter. This is rather hard to read, and would have made more sense (and been easier to read!) if the text were orange.
The descriptions of uses of orange flow from one topic to another; space seques into bridge colors, thenholidays, monks' robes, First Nation Days, butterflies, Diwali, and flags of the world. This makes a strange kind of sense and moves the text along quickly. I particularly like the picture of colored pencils, labeled with various shades of orange. I liked the apricot best!
There is a ton of information in this book, and I can see it being used to great effect in an art class. While I've seen basic books about colors and shapes, this is really a deep dive into the history and use of orange that is almost like a chapter out of What is cColor? : The Global and Sometimes Gross Story of Pigments, Paint, and the Wondrous World of Art by Steven Weinberg. I wonder if Poliquin and Morstad are working on books about other colors as well.
Do you know a young reader whose favorite color is orange? They'll be thrilled to see this detailed history of this color and its name. I had no idea that until about 600 years ago, there was no word in English for the color between yellow and red! This exploration tracks the distribution of the orange fruit, its various names, and how these evolved for "narang" into "orange". There are also discussions of different types of orange paint, from arsenic orange to chromium orange made with lead. Famous artworks, like Rothko's Orange and Yellow or Christo and Jeanne-Calude's orange fabric in Central Park are profiled , and even fruits and cheese get explained. It makes sense that spacesuits are orange so that they stand out against blue sky and water.
The pictures show the wide variety of orange items nicely, and have plenty of detail. Most of the time, the text is black on white, but there are a few pages where it is on dark pages in shades just a bit lighter. This is rather hard to read, and would have made more sense (and been easier to read!) if the text were orange.
The descriptions of uses of orange flow from one topic to another; space seques into bridge colors, thenholidays, monks' robes, First Nation Days, butterflies, Diwali, and flags of the world. This makes a strange kind of sense and moves the text along quickly. I particularly like the picture of colored pencils, labeled with various shades of orange. I liked the apricot best!
There is a ton of information in this book, and I can see it being used to great effect in an art class. While I've seen basic books about colors and shapes, this is really a deep dive into the history and use of orange that is almost like a chapter out of What is cColor? : The Global and Sometimes Gross Story of Pigments, Paint, and the Wondrous World of Art by Steven Weinberg. I wonder if Poliquin and Morstad are working on books about other colors as well.
December 15, 2025
While I found the narrative to be a little scattered, I really enjoyed this! I'm a word nerd, so I loved learning that there was no English word for "the color betwixt red and yellow" prior to the introduction of the orange fruit to Europe. Also nerded out over learning the origin of the word orange comes from the Tamil word for "fragrant" and how it morphed and changed across different languages as the fruit spread from India to the Mediterranean. The book continues with an interdisciplinary look at the color orange in a way that is engaging for kids and adults alike. Such a neat book!
December 25, 2025
There are many picture books about colors, but the cover drew me to it, and then when I saw that illustrator face Julie Morstad was on the case, here we are. The text is in many ways not surprising--we learn lots of stuff about orange kids and adults didn't know: 600 years ago there was no word for "the colour betwixe yelow and reed"--The Canterbury Tales. But I was engaged and learned stuff, and the illustrations are as expected, a cut above.
PS: As a Dutch-American, I was disappointed not to see acknowledged that the Netherlands national color is orange! Come on, Rachel!
PS: As a Dutch-American, I was disappointed not to see acknowledged that the Netherlands national color is orange! Come on, Rachel!
December 6, 2025
4 1/2 stars. A beautiful and diverting exploration of the color and it's history. The author created exactly the book they wanted and did it beautifully. I felt it needed some question or idea to close the story and make the last assortment of facts feel less random. I like the idea of looking for the color but wished the question of which came first - the name or the fruit - had been revisited at the end.
December 29, 2025
A fun unique way to look at a color. There are facts about the color orange (like it didn't have a name for a long time. Just the color between red and yellow.) and that places have different international colors of orange. I didn't think there was a new way to talk about colors, but this book proves me wrong.
December 11, 2025
Historically, orange has always been one of my least favorite colors, often the least. Lately, though, orange has been really growing on me. Even more after reading this book! Rachel, pleeeeaaase make more about other colors! I reeeeaaally want it!!
December 24, 2025
I loved almost everything about this book. My only wish is that it was a little more cohesive in some places. A lot of spreads felt disjointed from the spread before it. But visually pleasing and really informative.
November 3, 2025
What a lovely, thorough exploration of the color orange! From many different cultural angles, too. Can we have a book like this for every color?
November 11, 2025
a whole book dedicated to my all time favorite color??? love love love
November 23, 2025
Not sure what I expected, but it wasn't this. However, I will share with the art teacher.
November 24, 2025
The arc of this book is from young mind to increasingly inquisitive mind. The text will generate many questions about the brief content.
November 29, 2025
Lovely and I very much like the Julie Morstad illustrations. Not sure whether this was on NYT best illustrated list. I can see doing a 5th grade day using just color books.
published Oct 21, 2025
published Oct 21, 2025
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 2, 2025
What a beautiful little book 🧡 Languages, art, history, cultures, animals, science…mimolette cheese. A bit of everything. Just lovely.
December 2, 2025
An interesting and beautiful look at the color orange, best for elementary aged students.
December 4, 2025
I loved this rich celebration and history of the color orange!
Age range: Kindergarten-Elementary
Age range: Kindergarten-Elementary
December 12, 2025
Informative. Lovely. Multicultural.
December 19, 2025
Very cool history of the color orange. Would love to pair this with Blue for a lesson.
December 27, 2025
Fascinating! Interesting facts, great illustrations.
December 30, 2025
This is an incredibly dynamic look at the color orange! Best for upper elementary school readers, this book asks readers to take time on each spread and make connections between shades of orange and the dynamic history through different geographical regions and facets of life (occupations, holidays, art, and food). I can see why this book is a Caldecott contender!
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews