WHEN THINGS AREN’T GOING RIGHT, GO LEFT

A simple strategy for lightening the weight of worries, doubts, fears, and frustrations.

For all that Reynolds depicts a young child (brown-skinned, with Afro-textured hair) walking along a road shedding bags and other luggage in the simply drawn illustrations, Colagiovanni’s allegorical wordplay seems addressed more to audiences that are old enough to see their lives in abstract terms. “One day, for no particular reason, nothing was going right. Absolutely, positively, NOTHING was going right. So…I decided to go left.” The decision alone allows a box full of worries—depicted as small, red monsters—to be left behind…followed by a bag of hairy green doubts and, at the bottom of a high-diving platform, both a suitcase of jagged orange fears and a backpack of beaky yellow frustrations yelling, “You can’t do it!” and “Give up already!” But after taking the plunge and suddenly realizing that going left eventually made everything go right, the narrator discovers that all the embodied bugaboos have shrunk so much that it’s easy to take them up again. Though it wraps up a bit neatly, those grappling with their own anxieties may find Colagiovanni’s words of wisdom useful. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A little easy-peasy but not bad advice.