By Anna Llenas
A big friendly monster wakes up with all his feelings tangled together, and a little girl helps him sort them into jars, one color at a time.
The Color Monster wakes up feeling all mixed up. His feelings are knotted together in a jumble, so he can't tell one from another and doesn't know what's wrong with him. A little girl offers to help. One at a time they pull the feelings apart and give each one a color and a jar of its own: yellow is happy, blue is sad, red is anger that burns and roars, black is fear, green is calm. By the last page the monster's feelings sit tidy on a shelf, each in its own jar.
For a child who blows up before they can tell you what's wrong, this hands them the whole move in one story: stop, give the tangled feeling a name, and set it in its own jar. Once a big feeling has a color and a place on the shelf, it stops being the entire world and becomes one bottle among several — something a child can point to instead of drown in. There's no tantrum on the page and nothing to brace for, which makes it a gentle way in to talking about a temper before a storm ever hits.