One Plus One Equals Blue

Educational Value

Readers will learn about synesthesia -- the neurological condition, associated with artists, in which one sensation invokes another. In the case of 12-year-old Basil Feeney, he's poor at arithmetic because he confuses numbers and colors: 3 and 6, for instance, are different shades of yellow. He's befriended by a classmate with the same condition who has learned to turn it to her advantage. The details on synesthesia won't overwhelm young readers, but neither do they enhance the main story about Basil's ruptured relationship with his mother, and they lose impact by being incidental rather than integral to the plot.

Positive Messages

Talking about your problems is fundamental to coping with them: That's what 12-year-old Basil Feeney learns from his new friend Tanzie Verplank, both of whom have the same unusual neural condition.

Positive Role Models

Seventh-grader Tanzie is everything you'd want a girl to be, and maybe a little more. Confident, compassionate, assertive, and outgoing, she would be too perfect, except for the fact that we see she comes from a home where she's lost in the fog of her parents' careers. At best, a young reader with a disability will see how Tanzie's openness and optimism have served her well. At worst, some young readers might find Tanzie too goody-goody to be true. Motherly oddball Gram presents a more complex figure. Introduced as an artsy but competent homemaker, she seems the idealized, good-hearted hippie. But the story adds details that present readers with a hard truth: an impetuous decision that Gram made early in her life foreclosed many opportunities afterward. Readers might reflect that Gram has made the best of her mistake.

Parents Need to Know