The Bad Mood and the Stick

"Once there was a stick and a bad mood," begins the story. The bad mood (depicted in Forsythe's illustrations as a scowling rainbow-colored cloud) hangs over the head of a girl named Curly. Curly's own sulky expression comes from having "seen an ice cream store but [not] gotten any ice cream." When Curly pokes her little brother with the stick, that cheers her up but transfers the bad mood to her mother. Curly's mother loses the bad mood when a raccoon startles a man into falling into a mud puddle. Though the story sounds mean-spirited (in much the same way as Snicket's hugely popular Series of Unfortunate Events), the cheeriness of the yellow and orange gouache, colored ink, and pencil drawings on bright white paper offsets any unkindness. As the text says, "You never know what's going to happen," and by the end of the story there's been a wedding and ice cream for everyone. On one double-page spread toward the end, the bad mood moves in a series of small vignettes from cat to bird to man to dog and on and on: "You yourself had it several times." A humorous and neatly circular ending begins the whole process all over again. This light take on a negative feeling may be useful to adults working with children, and the concept of a bad mood being normal and temporary may be a new one to the audience. susan dove lempke