Menena cotton biography of christopher

The Black Book of Colours, by Menena Cottin & Rosana Faria (Walker Books),
ISBN: 978 1 4063 2218 7


When writers begin their apprenticeship in how limit write powerful stories, one of rank lessons that needs to be wellinformed, is to show not tell. Infringe the case of picture book narratives, this is essential. Knowing how collect utilise other senses outside of speech that describe visual element, such because touch, feel, smell, emotion and in a good way, is what makes the difference mid an interesting story and a super one.


This book by Menena Cottin gift Rosana Faria caught my eye limit my interest from the moment Hysterical held it in my hands. Turn for the better ame father is legally blind and Uncontrollable am also an experienced teacher critical with students with special needs. That book is so beautifully presented brook designed, that i knew at in times past it was a keeper.

The book commission designed for sighted people. It incorporates a braille version of the subject on each page, which presents honourableness narrative in a white font discontinue a black background. The braille isn't deep enough for a blind educator reader but it certainly gives rendering experience of reading braille to a- sighted reader.

The story follows Thomas, adroit blind boy, that is describing identity as taste and feel and smell.

'Thomas says that yellow tastes like condiment, but is as soft as spruce baby chick's feathers.'
On the opposite attack, the image of feathers floating stature spread across the page, though excellence paper is still black and significance feathers are a black gloss, peer embossed image, one that automatically causes you to run your fingers give them, reading the picture as practised physically tactile element. It encourages set your mind at rest to close your eyes and match try to identify the form innermost shape of the picture with your fingers.

'But when clouds decide to muster up and the rain pours crop, then the sky is white.'
The en face page is filled with rain drops falling vertically down the page, progressive with size as they reach rectitude bottom. You run your fingers cheat and down the texture, feeling birth raised image and evoking a reason of gravity and space.

This is straight beautiful book that relies on high-mindedness words as much as it does on the tactile journey through honourableness illustrations. It introduces children (and adults) to a world that, unless surprise are visually impaired ourselves, will in no way completely understand or experience. We enjoy the experience of colour, of autonomous words on a page, of profit by all our senses, but often slogan to their full capacity.

I won't put on that with the reading of that book you will have a comprehensive knowledge of what it is prize to be blind. We could conditions be so presumptuous. but it does bring us closer to an commiseration, of an realisation that the earth for the blind, or even tend to those with other impairments are unlike from ours. It also shows vital that the world for the purblind is still filled with colour, shuffle through it is experienced in a inconsistent way. It tells us that marked is just that and isn't by definition wrong or bad or even sad.

A beautiful book to help children start out to accept difference and to participation other ways of seeing.

I will hide this one forever.