When Curly’s mother won’t let her have an ice cream, she gets in a bad mood. Until she pokes her brother Napoleon with a stick, and the bad mood passes to her mother, who cheers up when she sees a man called Lou fall in a muddy puddle, at which point the bad mood passes along to him.
The Bad Mood and the Stick written by Lemony Snickett and illustrated by Matt Forsythe follows a bad mood cloud as it passes from person to person as a humble stick sparks a series of chance encounters that cause the characters moods to change, though not always in the way you would expect! It’s a great visual model of how events can affect people’s emotions, with the bad mood cloud being more of a marker than a character, though it does take on something of a persona of it’s own towards the end of the story as it lurks around the corner waiting to catch someone unaware. I love this book as a fun way to spark conversations about feelings, and the cause-and-effect relationship between actions, events and feelings.
Lemony Snickett’s writing is well-paced and good humoured, but the nostalgia tinged illustrations by Matt Forsythe are the cherry on the top of The Bad Mood and the Stick for me, and complement the text perfectly. My favourite page spread is when the bad mood travels around the world and you get to piece together a vague chain of events that might have happened from who has the bad mood cloud throughout the sequence, which as well as being great fun to discuss with children is great for developing early years visual literacy.
I think this book is a great addition to the home library if you’re starting a collection of fun picture books, as you can see from the battered cover, ours has been very well loved!
Picture Book Dragons 