The Big Bad Mood

George is having one of those really awful days when nothing works, nothing is the way he wants it to be, and he isn’t above shouting and stamping and having an old-fashioned temper tantrum.  Mum and baby sister (or brother) are ready to head for the hills, but George continues on his rampage.  Mum says there is a ‘big bad mood’ around, but George can’t find it, even though he looks everywhere, and this makes his mood worse!  Then, all of a sudden, there it is, the Big Bad Mood in person, and quite a person it is:  big, round, blue and scribbled, looking like a child’s crayon drawing, it is quite determined to make everyone around moody too.  He and George gleefully start their campaign at once.  First they make an enormous sandwich with lots of horrid ingredients like spiders and caterpillars; then there are other upsetting adventures that cause people to have bad moods too, culminating in turning the swimming pool water into custard and jelly which not only makes the swimmers cross, but also ‘a little bit delicious’!  But then George starts to realise that perhaps making other people cross and unhappy is not a good idea, and he changes tactics.  He likes his friends, and putting them into bad moods has done nothing for his friendships.  The Big Bad Mood finds this hard to understand because he doesn’t have any friends anyway.  But after this, George is a reformed character (well, almost), and mum and small brother/sister and all his friends are back to being their own lovely selves.  There is a nice little twist at the end which lets us know that George will never be quite perfect.  There’s much humour in the story, highly unlikely, but great fun.  The illustrations have oodles of white space which emphasises George’s moods nicely, and the ‘monster’ is very monstrous in true monster fashion.