By Ferida Wolff, Harriet May Savitz
A worry shows up as a grinning little monster, and the book shrinks it by meeting each what-if with an answer too silly to stay scared of.
Every time somebody starts to worry, a little grinning creature turns up in the pictures and trails after them — that's the Worry, and it lurks in the corners of nearly every page. The book runs through a string of what-ifs, some the kind of thing a child actually frets about and some completely ridiculous, and it deflates each one with a solution just as ridiculous. The best-known: what if a hundred elephants come to tea and you've run out of tea bags? Give them lemonade instead. The art is a little odd and spidery, closer to Tim Burton than to anything cuddly. By the end it has made its quiet case that most worries get smaller once you step back and look for another way around them.
Some children clam up the second an adult says the word worry. This one never puts them on the spot. It doesn't ask what they're afraid of; it just turns the worry into a goofy character everybody in the book has to deal with, and lets a child laugh at it from across the room. The jokes also leave a small, usable idea behind — when something feels enormous, there's often another way to look at it. Mostly, though, the humor takes the temperature down first, which is a lot of why it can reach a child who goes stiff at a more earnest book.