Description Winner of the Caldecott Honor, the Charlotte Zolotow Award, and the Jane Addams Peace Award When Sophie gets angry, she runs outside and climbs her favorite tree. Everyone has their own way of dealing with anger. What do you do when you get angry? In everyday life, there's no shortage of things that make us angry — it's hard to imagine a single day going by without some flash of frustration. Children are no different. They get angry when their parents seem to take a sibling's side, when they can't have something they want, when it feels like no one understands them... Today, Sophie is angry because of her sister and her mother. Sophie is happily playing when her older sister comes over and grabs her stuffed gorilla, saying, "It's my turn!" That alone is enough to make her furious, but then her mother takes her sister's side, saying, "It's your sister's turn now, Sophie." Before the words are even finished, her sister yanks the toy away, and Sophie tumbles over her toy truck. That's the moment her anger explodes. Sophie's blue eyes turn even bluer as she stomps her feet, flails her fists, and screams, "AAAAH!" She screams until she turns red, then bright red. Then she runs out of the house and keeps running, running, running until her legs give out beneath her. Sophie's run takes her to the woods near her house. Walking along the forest path, she cries — just a little, just for a moment. Because once anger fades, sadness often follows. And then, she begins to notice things she hadn't seen before: trees, rocks, ferns. She hears birdsong she hadn't heard before. Sophie slowly walks along the path and finds a great old beech tree. Sitting up in its branches, feeling the breeze brush through her hair and watching the rippling water below, her anger washes away completely, replaced by a wave of happiness. No one can go through life without ever getting angry. And bottling up anger only makes things worse. So what should we do with it? Anger is like a stubborn child — ignoring it or trying to suppress it only causes bigger problems. The answer is to do what Sophie does: acknowledge the angry feelings, comfort them, and then let them go. Once we do, we can rediscover the small joys that anger had been blocking from view — just as Sophie, on her way home, notices the trees, rocks, and ferns she hadn't seen before, and hears the birds and squirrels she hadn't heard before, returning home in good spirits. One of the greatest charms of When Sophie Gets Angry, Really, Really Angry is how vividly it captures a child's anger through bold lines and colors — so striking that even children who can't yet read can immediately understand what's happening. While the text is spare and calmly narrates the situation without exaggeration, the illustrations pulse and swirl with Sophie's raw emotion. Yet as you turn the pages and let yourself sink into the artwork, by the time you close the book, your own anger — if you had any — has quietly settled, too. That's because the book understands how you feel. Anger, whether directed at yourself, at someone else, or even acknowledged by a book, tends to dissolve once it's truly seen and understood. For that reason alone, this book deserves to be called one of the finest picture books of this century. Many of Molly Bang's picture books are said to be inspired by her daughter, Monica (Monica Bang Campbell herself grew up to become a children's book author, influenced by her mother). When Sophie Gets Angry, Really, Really Angry is perhaps the most representative of these works. The reason this book has resonated with and been embraced by so many children over so many years is that it was written and illustrated by someone who closely observed a real child and sought to truly understand her feelings.