Julie Fogliano and Marla Frazee’s “Because of a Shoe” and Beatrice Alemagna’s “Her Muddy Majesty of Muck” address children’s anger with compassion.
By Joshua David Stein
Joshua David Stein’s latest picture book is “Make New Friends,” illustrated by Mariachiara Di Giorgio.
Feb. 20, 2026 (NYTimes.com)
When I was 9, my divorcing parents sent me to a psychologist for a battery of tests. When I was 30, my mother, for reasons known only to her, sent me the report, a dozen pages of yellowed single-spaced type. One line jumped out at me: “While Josh’s anger may be the primary affective expression, it is a blanket for the pain.” I framed that page when I got it and it now hangs on my wall, for it was true then and it is true now.
If only I had had books like Julie Fogliano’s BECAUSE OF A SHOE (Knopf, 40 pp., $19.99, ages 2 to 5), illustrated by Marla Frazee, and Beatrice Alemagna’s HER MUDDY MAJESTY OF MUCK (Hippo Park, 56 pp., $19.99, ages 5 to 8), I might have thrown off my rage blanket sooner.
Bookstore shelves groan with “social and emotional learning” books, bought by anxious (loving) parents for their anxious (loved) children. But too often there’s a stink of fixing, an air of pedantry, to those pages. Few books in that genre treat both their subject and their readers with as much respect as Fogliano’s and Alemagna’s do. These aren’t didactic works. They are art, with soul-stirring depth and resonance.
Fogliano’s is more straightforward. It concerns a shoe. More specifically, the putting on of a shoe. More specifically, some very big feelings about the putting on of said shoe. The shoe itself, a red low top with Velcro fasteners, is harmless, but it’s the catalyst for a fierce power struggle between a mother and her young child.
On the very first spread, a red-haired child tears across the right-hand page, fleeing an unknown pursuer while clutching a pink stuffed bunny by its leg. The text reads, “even when …”
Fogliano is a champion of this type of elliptical, suspense-building opener. Her 2013 book, “If You Want to See a Whale,” uses the “if …” construction to languorously elongate whale-watching’s inherent waiting time.
In “Because of a Shoe,” she coils one very long sentence in tight loops: “even when … because of a shoe (a too-tight shoe a too-loose shoe) you are screaming and you don’t want to be screaming but you just can’t stop screaming. …” The words tumble on as the child’s (and the mother’s) anger increases.
Anyone who has flipped their lid — that is, all of us — knows the feeling: a certain claustrophobia that sets in as the world splits into good and bad, us and them. Here both the mother and her child are refreshingly and realistically dysregulated. As the tantrum increases in potency, Frazee’s illustrations do too. At the apex/nadir of the tantrum, they are literally black-and-white, like dichotomous thought.
Of course, Fogliano doesn’t abandon us in the eighth circle of toddler hell. “Even when” becomes “even then,” a resolution as cathartic as that of Beethoven’s Ninth or Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”: “even then you are still you (funny sweet you) and i am still me (funny sweet me) and we are not a shoe.” The tantrum abates, color returns, the shoe is put on — and then, quickly and because this isn’t about rightness and wrongness, thrown off again.
The road from rupture to repair in Alemagna’s book is more fantastical, and yet it maintains its emotional verisimilitude. “Her Muddy Majesty of Muck,” originally published in Italian, follows its young narrator, Yuki, into a subterranean world presided over by a massive warm-brown blob of a mud princess. Cast there by the internalized critiques seeded by her older brother, Shen — “When I’m angry, I scream/and stomp on the ground./Sometimes I cry. That’s why/Shen doesn’t like me” — Yuki finds Her Majesty, rage personified, to be charming and polite, if a little menacing.
Her Majesty guides Yuki through a Dantean geography of woe. She walks her through the Wicked Woods and introduces her to a cadre of smelly little creatures called the Boogers who “love making people feel terrible.” They jump into the self-extinguishing Lake Youbegone, sort through the cluttered Museum of Cast-Away Things and visit the Grumporium, a pantry stocked with “edible anger in powders and liquids,” including “freshly squeezed juice from an argument.” Remarkably, the tour isn’t gloomy at all.
Alemagna is one of the greats, up there with Tomi Ungerer, Maurice Sendak and Leo Lionni. She belongs to the distinctly European children’s book tradition of unease and irresolution. It’s easy and neat to say anger is bad or best avoided. But what is that but a second arrow thrust into someone already suffering?
Alemagna suggests we address our anger with compassion. Her Majesty isn’t demonic or even that unpleasant. She is muddy, yes, but we’ve been bathing in mud for eons. The woods are lovely. The Boogers are cute. The sea bunnies in Lake Youbegone are totes adorbs.
Just before Yuki ascends back into real life, she assures Her Royal Muddiness that she’ll return: “‘I’m not leaving forever,’ I say, and hug her. ‘I’ll come back to play, I promise. We’ll make mud pies.’”
Children know, after all, that anger can be, among other things, a comfort, a cozy blanket indeed.
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 22, 2026, Page 14 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Anatomy of a Meltdown. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
(Contributed by Michael Kelly, H.W.)