By Jory John
A sunflower seed who has decided he's just plain bad tells you exactly how he got that way, and then quietly starts to change his mind.
This seed is bad. He says so himself, right on the first page. He glares, he lies, he cuts in line, he never washes his hands, he shows up late and leaves early. But then he stops and tells you the rest of the story: he wasn't always like this. He was once one of many seeds on a happy sunflower, until the day he was scooped up, bagged, held in a giant mouth, and spat back out onto the sidewalk. After that he just felt bad, so he acted bad, and everyone started calling him the bad seed until he believed it. And then, one ordinary day, he decides he's tired of it, and thinks maybe he could try to be a tiny bit better. Not perfect. Just a little better than yesterday.
It gives a child a way to talk about being 'the bad one' without ever putting them on the spot, because it's a seed doing the confessing, not them. The backstory does something clever: it shows that the seed's meanness came from a hurt, which lets a child feel for him even while they laugh at him. And the ending is honest in a way children trust. He doesn't magically turn good. He just decides to try, and slips sometimes, and tries again, which is exactly how being good actually works.