I want ice cream!

K-Gr 2--A young boy shifts through five different emotional phases--playful, jealous, upset, pouty, and angry--during a tantrum to convince his parent to let him have ice cream; the adult says "no" every time. Paired with insistent dialogue befitting of the boy's darkening mood, black-and-white doodle-like drawings simply focus on the boy's body language and facial expressions. The scenes are deliberately infused with different solid colors to represent each particular emotion, such as red for "angry," spreading from the text background to settle in the boy's shirt. The tantrum ends abruptly when the child realizes his adult's answer of "no" will not waver, but the process of this acceptance remains unexplained. A final wordless page spread shows the boy looking, in surprise, at three children happily eating ice cream, dressed in blue, green, and red shirts. Given the book's color-emotion symbolism, an unwanted comparison can easily be drawn by young readers as they look between the contented children, whose adults seem to have said "yes" to their emotional displays, and the main character, who walks away empty-handed. VERDICT As a visual social-emotional teaching tool for young children, this book would require a great deal of adult-led discussion to untangle the ending and explain why it is important for a child to accept an adult's refusal.--Rachel Mulligan, Westampton, NJ

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. (Picture book. 3-7) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.