I'm Furious

by Elizabeth Crary, Jean Whitney (Illustrator)

This series recognizes that children are entitled to their feelings even when their behavior needs to be corrected. It acknowledges specific feelings and offers children several ways to deal with them. Each book features a choose-your-own-adventure format, and shows what different outcomes of choices might be--allowing children to back up and try another solution if they don't like the outcome, or to try a variety of choices to see how each might turn out. When Matt's little brother ruins his best baseball card, Matt wants to "knock him flat." Readers will identify with Matt's feelings, and can help him choose a better way to handle his anger.

32 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1993

Reviews

[Sahar Pirmoradian]

The protagonist gets angry as his brother ruins one of his favorite cards. While his mom acknowledges his anger, she asks him about his choices, e.g. socking his brother, kicking soccer ball, cleaning garage, talking with a friend, listening to music, …. Each choice takes the reader to a page to continue the story and learn about the consequence of that choice. From that page, the reader again gets directed to other choices at different pages.

My eight-year-old daughter loved this book and asked me to read it together multiple times. She liked that she could control the story by making choices and jumped to different pages.

What I liked about the book was the distinction between feelings and behaviors. While feelings should be acknowledged, the behavior won’t be acceptable if it hurts other people. Also, different choices may need to be tried until the person gets calm. That distinction and the process helped me to set more clear expectations with my daughter when she sounds angry.

[Tralyn L]

Not what I was looking for, but a great resource for later when my boys are old enough to participate in the excersizes.

Geared more for the school aged children. 7 and up.

[Randie D. Camp, M.S.]

Teaches coping strategies for dealing with anger. The reader must make choices and that decides how the story unfolds.