3 stars
Cute, but also weird. I liked the idea of the Color Monster. At the beginning, his emotions are all mixed up and he doesn’t know how he feels. Throughout the book, a little girl (who looks remarkably angry at the beginning when she tells him he’s all mixed up- seriously, chill out, kid) helps his sort out his feelings.
I found it a little weird that to do this, they literally bottle his feelings. I think that there had to be a better way to represent sorting through feelings (putting into piles or even open boxes). The bottles felt too restrictive as there is too much of a connection to “bottling your feelings up”.
Then the book goes through various emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and calm. The girl describes each emotion, how it feels, and what you might do when you feel that way. Good basic understanding of emotions, but it doesn’t really give any steps to alleviate the bad feelings or mention how it’s okay to feel them. It also seemed like it was saying you shouldn’t feel more than one emotion at a time, which is a bit simplistic and not very helpful.
I was a little torn on the artwork. I kind of liked it, but it was also so messy and childish that part of me was a little turned off by it. Some pages just looked too sloppy for my taste, although I did think the anger section had a nice representation.
Overall, I thought it was good. Nice basis for starting a conversation about emotions and how to figure out how one is feeling.