A pigtailed, paper cutout girl assists a scribbly, googly-eyed monster in sorting his mixed-up emotions, represented by different colors, into jars. Sadness, no surprise, is blue; in the accompanying tableau, the monster sits with the girl on her bed, while twined string creates "rain" falling from pop-up clouds. When the monster is angry, he "blazes bright red," and when he is calm, he turns green as he reclines in a pop-up hammock. Despite the odd and potentially unhealthy message about bottling up one's emotions, Lllenas's emphasis is on identifying emotions over constraining them, and a closing scene emphasizes that love can't be contained. Ages 3-7. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

PreS-K-Employing a rainbow of tones, a young girl tries to help her multihued friend understand why he is "feeling all mixed up." The unnamed child distinguishes five emotions (happiness, anger, sadness, fear, and calm) and articulates what each one might feel like by equating it with a color. A smiling golden monster on a spread featuring yellow leaves and cutouts represents happiness, describing it as "yellow like the sun." The text explains, "When you're happy you laugh, jump, dance and play. You want to share that feeling with everyone." Conversely, when blue, "you're sad you might want to cry or be alone." Most dramatically, a red monster jumps off the page and declares, "When you're angry, you want to stomp and roar and shout, `It's not fair!'" Emotions are described in age-appropriate terms, and although calm is a bit tricky ("you breathe slowing and deeply. You feel at peace."), there's no question what the fellow bathed in green is feeling as he rests in a hammock, eyes closed with a smile on his face. A final emotion is left unnamed for readers or listeners to identify, but pink hearts give it away. A number of books, such as Molly Bang's When Sophie Gets Angry-Really, Really Angry (Scholastic, 2004), explore how a child deals with a particular emotion; Color Monster considers the range of feelings a child can experience. As with most pop-ups, durability is a question. VERDICT Less a story than a vehicle to initiate a reassuring conversation about emotions and how to identify them.-Daryl Grabarek, School Library Journal © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A child helps a mixed-up monster sort out its feelings in this inventive pop-up import from Spain. Compartmentalization is the child's strategy, as she urges the googly-eyed monster to pour its feelings into individual glass jars. Each emotion is linked to a color: happiness is yellow; sadness, "gentle and blue like a rainy day"; anger, a violent splash of red; calm "is as light as a green leaf / floating in the wind." One spread-filling pop-up is devoted to each emotion/color, from clouds with lines of string "rain" to a hammock strung between leafy trees; all the now-full jars regather toward the end with pull-tabs to reveal their contents. There's one feeling that is not accounted for, though. "What could it be?" puzzles the girlbut opening the final spread reveals the smiling monster radiating scribbly pink hearts, and viewers will have no trouble figuring it out. In the simple, childlike illustrations, which are made from pieces of cutand often previously usedpaper and scribbled crayons, even the flat figures look 3-D. Bright and buoyant. (Pop-up picture book. 5-8) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.