Colour and Me!
Michaela Dias-Hayes
Owlet Press

I’ll never forget, back in the day when I was doing my very first teaching practice in a primary school in south London coming upon a six year old West Indian boy, Errol, during an art session with white paint all over his hands – backs and fronts – trying to paint his face white too. ‘I hate by brown skin’ he said. That memory has stayed with me ever since and it saddens me that in the twenty first century, Michaela’s young son should have said something similar to her, prompting her to create this celebration of brown skin.

Michaela’s narrator is an adorable little girl who like many children of her age, loves finger painting. She shares with readers, her pet turtle Myrtle and her grandmother her experiments in colour mixing using the three primary colours.

First she makes orange by mixing red and yellow, then mixes yellow and blue, which results in

the same colour as her turtle and so on. Putting all three primary colours together gives her brown, which she recognises as her own colour. “This is ME. This colour suits me … PERFECTLY!” she announces and then goes on to create a glorious rainbow shaped design on the wall …

The positivity of both the rhyme and the glorious illustrations in this, the first of Michaela Dias-Hayes’ books as both author and illustrator, shine through on every spread of this, the first of a new series.