Reaching into his desk for his box of crayons, poor Duncan makes an unpleasant discovery one day at school. His disgruntled crayons have gone on strike! Fed up with being overused, underused, or completely ignored and misunderstood, each has written a special letter to their little artist friend.

Red complains of working overtime––surely no other color works so hard to produce fire engines, apples, strawberries and EVERYTHING! Red doesn’t even get holidays off! How about a rest!

Beige has the opposite problem … why isn’t Beige used to color more than just wheat? How many kids like to color wheat anyway, Beige argues. Why does Duncan neglect Beige so? Beige is worth more than just a possible choice for turkey dinners!

Purple loves being Duncan’s favorite color for grapes, dragons, and wizard’s hats but being a perfectionist, it would like to see Duncan stay inside the lines. Such a waste of Purple’s beautiful color…

And what about white? Let’s not even go there! But wouldn’t it be nice if black could be more than an outline for the brighter colors? Beach balls don’t have to be multiple colors. A TOTALLY black beach ball could be nice for a change!

With all of his colors complaining, and yellow and orange not speaking to one another over rights to Duncan’s shining suns, he has a dilemma––he only wants to color, but how can he make things right with his old buddies? Including pink, his sister’s favorite!

Author Drew Daywalt’s clever text and Oliver Jeffers’ wonderful childlike artwork keep the reader turning the pages until at last we discover Duncan’s solution. The Day the Crayons Quit is an out of the box (excuse the pun!) work that has done an excellent job of transporting us into the world of a child and his crayons. The illustrations allow the adult reader to become a child again, while the letters from the crayons are inspired! Children will love these humorous missives and the antics of the crayons that wrote them!