Emotions are rarely black and white. Angry Me artfully captures the nuances of anger and the reactions it inspires as a girl deals with the quotidian trials of her day.
Different feelings--sadness, frustration, disappointment, outrage--often underlie anger. A brown-skinned girl in a pleasingly multi-colored, multi-patterned outfit expresses the many ways she gets angry: "It's my turn!" angry; "I can't do it!" angry; "What about me?" angry. She tries to remember to use her words but sometimes, she says, "my words come out sounding angry." Sometimes, "I can't think of any words at all, just mad sounds." And sometimes, words won't work or "just seem too hard." The girl's parents are supportive, offering the words and comfort she can't always find inside herself and, as she works through her feelings, the child helps readers understand that there's a lot more to anger than a simple hot emotion.
Sandra V. Feder (Bitter and Sweet) goes deeper into a complex emotion than most children's books dare, while remaining firmly within a young reader's realm of understanding. Rahele Jomepour Bell (Our Favorite Day of the Year) uses gorgeous hand-printed textures, scanned and painted digitally, in illustrations that invite readers to delight in details like a child's rainbow-colored shoes or a lace doily on a rough dresser in a baby's room. Angry Me does an unusually thoughtful job showing that anger is a normal, many-faceted emotion--and that it doesn't last forever. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor