Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Ages: Infant – 7 years old
It can be hard to take my daughter’s moods seriously. I mean, what on earth does a young child have to be grumpy about? Besides, she looks really cute with her arms folded across her chest, blonde hair dangling into her frowning brown eyes.
My daughter took the term ‘terrible twos’ to extremes. Age three was not much better and now we just accept that being ‘spirited’ is part of her exciting personality.
The New York Times bestselling picture book, Grumpy Monkey has been the perfect tool to help us teach our daughter about accepting feelings …
Despite not really understanding why she is grumpy most of the time, we try to find ways of helping her deal with the unexpected emotions.
Often the act of reading this book results in a change of mood … It’s just so hilariously illustrated!
Much like my daughter who is sometimes grumpy for no reason, Jim Panzee wakes up on the wrong side of the tree to discover nothing is right.
“The sun was too bright, the sky was too blue, and the bananas were too sweet.”
With encouragement from his friends, Jim puts on a happy face, but he doesn’t feel happy inside. Everyone tells Jim what he should be doing.
”You should swing with us … You should lie in the grass … You should dance.”
Jim doesn’t feel like doing any of these things.
Jim storms off and comes across his friend Norman, who appears to have porcupine needles in his (cough) rear end from dancing with Porcupine. Clearly grumpy also, Norman is frowning and his eyebrows are bunched up.
They sit together on a tree branch as the sun sets. Norman, who now appears to have band-aids where the porcupine prickles were, says ”It hurts… but I’ll probably feel better soon enough.”
When Norman asks Jim if he is still grumpy, he replies with, “Yes, but I’ll probably feel better soon enough, too. For now, I need to be grumpy.”
Norman says it’s a wonderful day to be grumpy and Jim agrees. They both feel a little bit better already.
Written by Suzanne Lang, Grumpy Monkey is a New York Times bestselling picture book. The illustrations by Max Lang really bring this book to life, injecting hilarity to this very important lesson.
Grumpy Monkey is a great picture book on dealing with unexplained feelings and the danger of suppressing them…
Although the message of this book is important, Grumpy Monkey is also a lot of fun!
