By Kyo Maclear
Virginia wakes up in a wolfish mood where everything is horrible, and her sister Vanessa, once the jokes and sweets fail, paints her a way back out.
One morning Virginia wakes up wolfish, and the whole house seems to tip with her. She growls, she howls, she won't come out from under the covers, and she says everything is horrible — the birds, the sun, the noise of the world. Her sister Vanessa runs through the whole playbook: sweets, jokes, coaxing, cheer. None of it works. Then Vanessa asks a better question. Not why are you sad, but where would you rather be. Virginia describes a perfect place called Bloomsberry, with frosted cakes and a garden, so Vanessa gets out her paints and puts Bloomsberry right on the bedroom wall: flowers, trees, a ladder, a swing. Arsenault's pages start out nearly colorless and gray, and the color seeps back in as the mood lifts, so the sadness changes on the page with almost no words to explain it.
I'd reach for this one when a child's low mood has pulled the whole house down with it, and whoever's trying to fix it — a sibling, you — is worn out. What I like is that the cheering-up doesn't work: Vanessa's jokes and sweets bounce right off, which is a real relief to any child who's been on the receiving end of a grown-up determined to make them smile. What helps instead is Vanessa taking Virginia's imaginary place seriously enough to paint it. It's also a book about art doing that job, so it tends to reach a child who draws when they can't find the words. It runs a little older than most of these books: a five-year-old follows the wolf, while an eight- or nine-year-old starts to catch what the wolf stands for.