Mora, Oge. Everybody in the Red Brick Building. Written by Anne Wynter. Balzer + Bray, 2021.

It's the middle of the night, and everybody in the red brick building is awake. In this double-page spread, Oge Mora uses color association and intraiconic text to illustrate the sounds that emanate from each window.

Mora gives each apartment in the building its own color scheme. On the verso, a baby wails in the burnt orange apartment on the second floor, a pet parrot wakes his owner in the teal apartment on the third floor, and a frightened cat leaps out of a ground-floor window. On the recto, friends play in the sky blue apartment on the third floor and a girl launches a toy rocket from the window of her second-floor mustard-colored apartment. While the text and images in the previous openings relay these details, this spread is wordless and depicts the building's residents in silhouette.

Lambert defines intraiconic text as "words that are an integral part of a picture" (16), and, in this spread, Mora incorporates her use of color with this design element. The intraiconic text in the spread represents onomatopoeic sounds that create what Lambert describes as "a text that functions something like a soundtrack" (47). The red brick building's playlist includes the baby's shrill cry, "waaaaah!," which unfurls from her window in bold red and orange lettering that gets bigger, presumably, as the cry becomes more pronounced and the baby remains unconsoled. The parrot, an animal thought to be intelligent, squawks "Rraak! WAKE UP!" in a scholarly serif font in colors that complement teal. As the noise from the friends playing grows louder in the sky blue apartment, the font size of the sounds "pitter patter" increase, and "STOMP!" is emphasize in large capital white letters, on a deep blue background. The reader can hear and feel these sounds. The speedy rocket whooshes out of the mustard apartment in lime-green letters that spell "PSSSHEEEEEEWWW!!!" and the surprised driver of the purple car yelps "WEEYOOO" as he, like the pink and violet text, swerves when the cat falls to the ground.

Works Cited

Lambert, Megan Dowd. Reading Picture Books with Children: How to Shake Up Storytime and Get Kids Talking About What They See. First paperback ed., Charlesbridge, 2020.

Mora, Oge. Everybody in the Red Brick Building. Written by Anne Wynter. Balzer + Bray, 2021.