Gurple and Preen: A Broken Crayon Cosmic Adventure

Picture book stories about colours are always a welcome addition to library shelves. Add in a few simply-drawn space creatures with interesting character traits, and you should have a winning combination.

Gurple is an excitable purple robot. Pal Preen, who looks like a mini UFO sporting long eyelashes and a fetching polka-dot bow, is green in colour and communicates not with words but with beeping sounds that Gurple is able to interpret. They are both upset because their spaceship has crashed, spilling its cargo of crayons everywhere. Gurple bursts out:

”How are we ever going to repair the ship? It’s impossible!

We need solar-powered batteries, fusion plasma engines,

magnetic force fields –”

Each of the crayons seems to have something inside when broken open. In some cases, it is a useful object, such as the blue checked tablecloth that can be fashioned into a sling. But there are other items that Gurple can’t imagine having any utility in this time of need. Purple puzzle pieces? A lampshade that had been stowed inside the green crayon? Even “Itchy glitches!” An endless swath of toilet paper that has been rolled up inside the white crayon.

While Gurple has been stamping around complaining, Preen has been surveying the scene, checking out the materials to hand and experimenting with the various bits and pieces that might mend the broken space machine. Gurple is surprised and impressed by the ingenuity of his little friend’s efforts.

The moment has come to test the repairs.

Lights on the pod began blinking.

“It’s time,” Gurple said. Preen beeped again.

They slid the pods out of the box. “Nodes and codes,”

Gurple said “Please let this work.”

Suddenly the two mechanical beings are joined by others. Not only do we see the brown quail we saw earlier providing some help with the logistics of moving bundles of crayons, now there are several small human-looking astronauts, each having emerged from one of the crayons and been drawn with its colour. These space travellers admire what Preen has achieved, Gurple admitting that Preen did the work.

“Bip.” Said Preen. “Bip-bip boop.”

“She says they did it the way you do anything hard,”

Gurple translated. “Step by step.”

Then it’s time to load the ship with the crayons and their contents, the astronauts, and Gurple and Preen

“Where to next?” Gurple asked.

The commander tapped her computer.

“Everywhere,” she said. “The whole galaxy.

Star by star by star.”

The last page shows ‘the commander’ in a small bed by a window, leaning on her pillows and looking out at the night sky, with less-animated Gurple and Preen toys lying beside her and a scattering of crayons on a nearby shelf.

Author Park is probably better known for her books for older readers, such as Prairie Lotus and the Newbery-winning A Single Shard. Here she plunges readers directly into a narrative that is terse and somewhat disconnected. (Is “a pod” Gurple and Preen’s term for a crayon? That is what I concluded several pages in. But then when they are ready for blast-off, the text reads. “Lights on the pod began blinking” when referring to the spaceship.) Children will be tickled by the reversal of initial consonants that make the names of the main characters so intriguing, and there is always an appetite for a bathroom joke, but otherwise the story is rather pedestrian.

Digitally-rendered illustrations from veteran Ohi show Gurple and Preen dominating the pages, outlined in bold black. This differentiates them from the items which emerge from the crayons, which are paler in hue with a texture that imitates the impression of wax on paper. The bright crayons, themselves, which appear in profusion everywhere, are realistically solid-looking.

Gurple and Preen is a passable addition to a collection, but it is not a necessary purchase in spite of the credentials of the contributors.