A boy lives in a community that is entirely blue. Anything not blue gets thrown away immediately. The boy has a secret, though: He likes yellow. He secretly collects yellow things and hides them from his parents, thinking that liking yellow must be bad.
When his dad discovers him dancing among his yellow toys, however, the dad is surprisingly accepting—and then even paints their entire house yellow in support! Onlookers gawk, but as the days go by, people in other houses on the street begin to paint them in all the colors of the rainbow. The community transforms, and everyone soon wears whatever colors they like. The boy is no longer sad, and we are told, “Let YOUR colors SHINE and love whatever makes you YOU!”
There is no obvious LGBTQ representation in this book, but the rainbow theme makes it likely that it will be interpreted as an analogy for queerness, probably gender identity and/or expression. As Newbery honoree and Stonewall Award winner Kyle Lukoff has written, however, there are limits to metaphors in describing gender identity, and we shouldn’t be “asking … marginalized children to do the work of parsing clumsy metaphor to see themselves.” (I have no idea what Lukoff actually thinks of Out of the Blue, however, and if I have misused his thoughts about metaphor, the error is mine.)
This book’s general message of being oneself and celebrating difference is a fine one—let’s just be careful not to extend it to specific identities where it might not fit, or where a more direct story about a particular identity might be clearer and more relatable.
The boy and his father are White; other community members are a variety of skin tones.
