Rachel Poliquin’s 2025 picture book This is Orange: A Field Trip Through Color is lovely and quietly ambitious. It has only a limited story: it starts with orange, the fruit, and asks if the fruit or color came first. Answering this leads into historical discussions of the concept of the color between red and yellow, and the words for it. The book ends with a two-page spread of orange pencils that offer an implied suggestion to draw, followed by a two-page spread that directly invites readers to go and find orange in the world.
In between, Poliquin explores many different oranges. Readers get doses of history, art, nature, science, and politics. Julie Morstad‘s illustrations are central to these explorations. They differ markedly. One might show an orange fox isolated against a blank background. Another might show the different orange of Tokyo Tower as part of a complete landscape. The spread showing Monarch butterflies (orange everywhere) is very different from the gray to black of the Halloween spread, where the orange of the pumpkins is the exception.
Some of these changes are intentionally dramatic, and will invite, or require, explanation. The best example of this is September 30th. The left page shows a circle of people of all ages, showing Canadian kids wearing orange to honor the 150,00+ indigenous children the Canadian government took from their families. This is explained in gray print on a black page on the right. And this leads to the last component here: this book is designed for kids, but tackles some heavy topics, and some subtle ones. I mean, most adults don’t spend a lot of time considering how to think about concepts they lack words for.
