This Is Orange: A Field Trip Through Color

3.8

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Author(s)

Rachel Poliquin

Co-Authors / Illustrators

Julie Morstad

Publisher

Candlewick

Genre(s)

Age Range

Release Date

October 21, 2025

ISBN

978-1536230529

Buy This Book

"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.

Editor review

1 review

Orange You Glad to Know This History?

November 10, 2025 (Updated: June 29, 2026)

Overall rating

3.8

Plot

4.0

Characters

4.0

Writing Style

4.0

Illustrations/Photos (if applicable)

3.0

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.

Good Points

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.