I Want Ice Cream!

by Elisabetta Pica, Silvia Borando (Illustrator)

Overview

Someone's definitely screaming for ice cream in this illustrated tale of disappointment, resistance, and acceptance.

When a young boy is denied an ice cream cone by his dad, the disappointment he feels is extreme. What begins is a cycle of emotions expressed through color. From sadness (blue), to envy of others with cones of their own (green), to anger (red), and more, his progression through a range of feelings / tactics is both humorous and cathartic to readers experiencing both his pain and the excessiveness of his reaction.

Meanwhile, his father's consistent response of a simple "No" serves as its own model of effectiveness in the face of tantrum. The art uses sparse, thick-lined images in black and white paired with a full range of colors, each associated with an emotional response. The simplicity of both the art and text combine to open the door to future referencing and resolving similar real-life situations that stem from hearing the word "No."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593383643
Publisher:	Penguin Young Readers Group
Publication date:	06/01/2021
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	48
File size:	11 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	2 - 4 Years

About the Author

Elisabetta Pica was born in Milan in 1960. She works as educator and teaches theater to people from ages 2 to 99. She travels all over Italy to promote reading among children through her plays and picture book readings. Elisabetta is the author of The White Book (with Lorenzo Clerici and Silvia Borando), originally published by the Italian publishing house minibombo and translated into English by Candlewick Press. Her books have been sold to China, France, Spain, and many other countries.

Silvia Borando was born in 1986. She earned her degree in Communication Design at the Polytechnic University of Milan in 2008. As a children's picture book author and illustrator, she founded the Italian publishing house minibombo in 2013, dedicated to little children and the grown-ups who read along with them. Her books have been translated into many languages and sold all around the world.

Editorial Reviews

07/01/2021

K-Gr 2—A young boy shifts through five different emotional phases—playful, jealous, upset, pouty, and angry—during a tantrum to convince his parent to let him have ice cream; the adult says "no" every time. Paired with insistent dialogue befitting of the boy's darkening mood, black-and-white doodle-like drawings simply focus on the boy's body language and facial expressions. The scenes are deliberately infused with different solid colors to represent each particular emotion, such as red for "angry," spreading from the text background to settle in the boy's shirt. The tantrum ends abruptly when the child realizes his adult's answer of "no" will not waver, but the process of this acceptance remains unexplained. A final wordless page spread shows the boy looking, in surprise, at three children happily eating ice cream, dressed in blue, green, and red shirts. Given the book's color-emotion symbolism, an unwanted comparison can easily be drawn by young readers as they look between the contented children, whose adults seem to have said "yes" to their emotional displays, and the main character, who walks away empty-handed. VERDICT As a visual social-emotional teaching tool for young children, this book would require a great deal of adult-led discussion to untangle the ending and explain why it is important for a child to accept an adult's refusal.—Rachel Mulligan, Westampton, NJ

School Library Journal

2021-05-05
Sometimes, no means no. Period.

A child out with an adult asks for ice cream. Amid expansive white space, the book’s minimal colors appear only in the title type, the scoops of ice cream, the child’s shirt, and the solid-colored backgrounds as the child progresses from happy, expectant, and hopeful to all the other emotions that progress toward a meltdown when a guardian won’t budge. Gender-neutral and drawn only with thick black outlines, the child wears a top that changes colors to match the backgrounds and the shifting moods: yellow for happy, green for envy (because everybody else has ice cream!), blue for tears of sadness, gray for obstinate, red for angry. As readers vicariously experience this child’s eventual acceptance of no, they may intuit that they, too, can manage difficult emotions, even when compromise seems increasingly unlikely. Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and Molly Bang’s When Sophie Gets Angry—Really, Really Angry… take a more nuanced and creative approach to helping children manage conflicts and emotions, but this story does center the child. As in “Peanuts” comics, the adult, appearing only from the waist down, looks the same on every page while the dynamic child contrasts with the static adult. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Simple lines, simple colors, simple story but a useful tale about complex emotions that often seem too big to contain. (Picture book. 3-7)

Kirkus Reviews