Grumpy Hat

Nicola Kent

Andersen Press, 2022

32pp., pbk., RRP $A16.99

9781839130373

Everyone knows that little sisters can be an-noy-ing! So when Ravi gets annoyed with Ruby and breaks her toy car in a rage, everyone goes to bed upset. Ravi wakes up the next morning with a bright red grumpy hat stuck fast on his head! And he can’t get rid of it, no matter how hard he tries… Ravi learns how to swap his grumpy hat for happy socks in this uplifting story about siblings, family life and controlling bad moods.

Everyone has woken up with their grumpy hat on and so this story will resonate with our youngest readers, but portraying a bad mood as an animate object brings well into their world of the concrete and the here and now.  Hats can be seen and touched and described whereas moods are more elusive, and little people don’t have the vocabulary or the skill to articulate them. So having an ugly, uncomfortable red hat that is “heavy like a log”, “itchy as a spider’s dance class”, “sticky as dough” and “tight like too-small-shoes”  not only creates a visual image of the feeling but starts to build their words to describe it.

And while each will have a story to add about a time their grumpy hat was stuck on, they will also be able to talk about a time that, like Ravi, they were able to swap it for happy socks.