Hailstones and Halibut Bones: Adventures in Color Book

What is orange? What is pink? What is white? Since its original publication in 1961, Hailstones and Halibut Bones, Mary O’Neill’s renowned work of poetry about the colors of the spectrum, has become a modern children’s classic. In 12 vivid poems, O’Neill explores and celebrates colors, showing how each one can be heard, touched, smelled, and seen.

John Wallner’s lavish illustrations, added to the book upon its reissue in 1989, perfectly complement O’Neill’s rich, rhythmic language. Children, parents, educators, and librarians continue to be engaged by this book, a true adventure in poetry and color.

Mary O’Neill’s Hailstones and Halibut Bones was published in 1961, becoming an instant classic.

John Wallner is the award-winning illustrator of more than 30 books for children.

Children's Literature

This beautifully illustrated book of poetry is actually "softer" than one might imagine from the title (which is only found once, in the section called "What is White?") given the complete text. Each color highlighted in the book gets a four-page spread; the text of the poem for each color is typically found on three pages with a few lasting only two pages. The individual sections all start out with the color "is" and then go into a list of what items, smells, and sounds make up that color. For example, "Brown is the color of a country road/Back of a turtle/Back of a toad./Brown is cinnamon/And morning toast/And the good smell of/The Sunday roast/. The individual color chapters are book-ended between two poems that introduce "The Colors" as personified beings that "pose and bend their knees/" . . . "dance, sing, laugh and cry." This is a lovely book to give as a gift to young readers and their parents looking for a slightly more sophisticated approach to learning colors. Reviewer: Jean Boreen, Ph.D.