I WANT ICE CREAM!

Sometimes, no means no. Period.  

A child out with an adult asks for ice cream. Amid expansive white space, the book’s minimal colors appear only in the title type, the scoops of ice cream, the child’s shirt, and the solid-colored backgrounds as the child progresses from happy, expectant, and hopeful to all the other emotions that progress toward a meltdown when a guardian won’t budge. Gender-neutral and drawn only with thick black outlines, the child wears a top that changes colors to match the backgrounds and the shifting moods: yellow for happy, green for envy (because everybody else has ice cream!), blue for tears of sadness, gray for obstinate, red for angry. As readers vicariously experience this child’s eventual acceptance of no, they may intuit that they, too, can manage difficult emotions, even when compromise seems increasingly unlikely. Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and Molly Bang’s When Sophie Gets Angry—Really, Really Angry… take a more nuanced and creative approach to helping children manage conflicts and emotions, but this story does center the child. As in “Peanuts” comics, the adult, appearing only from the waist down, looks the same on every page while the dynamic child contrasts with the static adult. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Simple lines, simple colors, simple story but a useful tale about complex emotions that often seem too big to contain.