AUTHOR: Sofía Gil and Mercé Galí
PUBLISHER: Flamboyant
GENRE: Children
READER’S NAME: Lynn Leazer
DATE: May 25, 2021

This is a self-help book for parents/adults to read to children in order to help them understand and cope with their negative thoughts and emotions. The first few pages are really addressed to adults rather than to children. Even in the ensuing pages, there are some fairly sophisticated words and concepts for children that don't read yet or are new readers, such as, personality, 10 to the 80,000,000,000,000th power, conscious, unperceived interrogation, a reference to crime/detective movies, [a scale of] 0 to 10.

Personality is explained as something one can "cook" with three ingredients: thoughts, feelings, and behavior. While this seems clever, I'm not at all sure that children will find it a comprehensible definition. The depiction of negative thoughts as troublesome animals is clever and might appeal to children, although it would have been even more appealing had it been developed into a story.

While the illustrations are cute and amusing, they are not terribly attractive or artistically interesting. In general, this book could be a useful tool for helping elementary school children that are experiencing problems caused by negative thoughts, but it is not one that a small child would just page through to enjoy the illustrations, or that a young reader would be able to comprehend without a fair amount of adult intervention and discussion with the child. Such "therapeutic" interaction between adult and child is the stated objective of this book.

This book would not be difficult to translate to English and might have some appeal in the U.S., where self-help books in general are very popular, and children's books that treat weighty societal issues seem to be in vogue.