WHOA, JEALOUSY!

“Jealousy is a feeling that gets inside you. You invite it in, and suddenly . . . There’s a No-Good Dirty Nasty Mean Feather-Faced Chicken filling up your living room.” In her own way, Hubbard (Park Beat, 2001, etc.) helps children understand and deal with this powerful emotion. (Adults might benefit as well.) Once the Chicken is invited in, Envy (a Sneaky, Creepy, Sharp-Tongued Snake), Greed (a Rude Rat), and Rivalry (an angry Red Hornet) follow. Then you end up all by yourself with only the mean and nasty critters. How to deal with it? “YOU have a choice. You let them in . . . and YOU can KICK THEM OUT!” Suggestions on how to do so are general: “Pluck that chicken! Knot that snake!” Cautions and key words are in large, colored type; gouache and watercolor-pencil illustrations have the same energy, vibrant colors, and style of Hubbard’s best earlier work. Jealousy is depicted as a large chicken with a black head, white-lined eyes, a red, triangular beak, and black white-veined leaves as feathers. The children’s thoughts appear as black or white tear shapes with contrasting colored print. Lively design, fanciful figures, and playfulness with type effectively convey the message that you can triumph over jealousy and its friends, just not exactly how. One quibble: the verso cites written by Woodleigh Marx Hubbard with Madeleine Houston; indeed she gets to dedicate her contribution “to the teachers of metaphor.” Nowhere else is there credit or acknowledgement of what, or how much, role she played. (Picture book. 5-8)