Unlike Harold and the Purple Crayon, in which Harold makes creative decisions and the crayon complies, this paper-over-board story features a demanding medium. "Gregory had a red pencil case,/ and in the pencil case/ lived a pencil,/ and in the pencil/ lived a magic line,/ and the line wanted to get out./ 'Take me for a walk,'/ said the line." Gregory, a blond boy, kneels at his art table, accompanied by a floppy toy bird that looks like a creature from Mercer Mayer's menagerie. Gregory obeys the insistent line's commands. "Can't you make me shapes?" the line asks. Gregory draws a geometric, charcoal-gray city. "I'm tired of just being black!" the line says. "Make me yellow and red and blue and green!" Gregory draws a portrait of his curious bird in a rainbow of colors. He covers poster paper with designs, which pop into three-dimensional forms, and he puts caricatures of himself and the bird in the fantasy scenes. Piggot's spreads grow increasingly abstract as the language becomes more excitable. Gregory simultaneously draws and rides a leaping lion, while a large colored pencil doodles a green squiggle elsewhere on the page (" 'More! More!' shouted the line"). Soon the margins disappear, and the realistically drawn Gregory soars through a colored-pencil landscape. While the graceful outlines and consistent color look more like the work of a practiced designer than a child, Gregory's artistic talent is not in doubt. Children may have mixed feelings, however, concerning the bossy line, which can be seen as an enthusiastic playmate or as a control freak. Ages 4-7. (June)
