When I See Red

“Use your anger to transform the world around you.”
Anni Lanz

This book!

It grabs you and it shakes you and it fills you with fire. It is raw and emotive and brilliantly sensory. The words and pictures collide in the deepest rubble of thunder highlighted by flash after flash of lightning. This is a stunning portrayal of anger and rage, of frustration and fury. This is an explosive meditation on anger that takes everything you feel when you are hurting and channels it for good. From crashing waves, roaring seas and flooded shores to strength, pride, courage and power.

“Use your anger to transform the world around you.”

This book by the breathtakingly talented Britta Teckentrup is written for us all. For this of us who feel flashes of anger and for those of raising strong willed fiery children, the ones we are assured will be confident, courageous and strong when they are grown.

This is a book that illustrates anger in its most natural wild form. The poetry and painting attack the senses and make us feel the intensity of fury and rage, of seeing red. We ride the emotions with the girl in the pages. We are with her

“Howling, roaring, whistling, whirling.
Gushing, pouring, twisting, twirling.”

This books helps us understand how anger can feel. How we can feel consumed by it, over powered by it, how we can feel wild and unstoppable like a furious dragon, a tornado, monsoon. We see how emotions and feelings change as we harness our energy and find ourselves not drowning but riding the waves, strong, tall, bold and proud. In charge of what we are feeling. This is a book to read to show that if we can harness our anger, if we can control it, we can make it a positive charge, we can use our feelings for good. Britta is reminding us in her meditation that reaching out, speaking out can help us. Being silent for too long makes our anger fester and spread inside of us. If we can share how we feel it can help us to accept it and deal with it, channel it and change it and turn the red mist to golden sun and clear blue skies. Once the air is clear and we remember to breathe, we can be free of our monsters and dragons. We can start anew.

We are using this beautiful book to explore anger and big emotions. We are going to collect words and phrases to describe our feelings and paint picture of different emotions. We are going to explore simile and metaphor as we think about how we feel and what we do when we are angry, when we are sad and happy. This is a powerful book for starting conversations with children about feelings and it is a wonderful inspiration for art and creative writing around emotions.

A stunning book from Britta Teckentrup She has a wonderful way with words and pictures. This is a book that will stay with me for a long long time.

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