Title: When Sadness Comes to Call
Author: Eva Eland
Illustrator: Eva Eland
Publisher: Andersen Press
Genre: Children’s picture book
Book format: Paperback
Sweet Strawberries: 
Description: Sadness comes to visit unexpectedly. But when you let Sadness in, you’ll discover this strange guest is not what it seems…
*Free copy provided by publisher for review…
Review: This is a really good picture book to help get children to understand feelings of sadness. ‘When Sadness Comes to Call’ in paperback is a little smaller than A4 in size and is filled with thick matt pages of illustration and some text. The cover has an interesting feel to it as it’s not smooth but rather feels more like a canvas.
I like how simple this book seems and yet how powerful the message inside is. One day sadness comes to visit. The sadness is represented by an actual blue/green visitor who turns up at a child’s house. The book explains how sadness can sometimes sit too close, making you feel like you can’t breathe, how sometimes you may want to hide sadness away. But rather than showing a child just hiding their feelings, the emotion or Sadness is literally shown being hidden in a cupboard. There are literal examples on many of the pages and I like the way the emotion of sadness is represented in this way.
The book doesn’t go into great details but it doesn have to. It helps to show how sadness is sometimes there, how children can cope with it, and how sometimes you just need to acknowledge it is there and it will eventually go away. Throughout the whole story Sadness is a character who looms over the child but just looks like a sad blob. The illustrations towards the end though are good as they show how sadness is disappearing and eventually smiles as well.
The illustrations are so simple and are in brown outlines and white, with a touch of pinky-red colouring on some pages and turquoise representing Sadness. Although simple, the illustrations still do a good job of showing the effect Sadness has on the child. I like how the pictures look like a child could have drawn them, their simplicity makes the story of Sadness feel more important.
This is a great picture book to help children understand and process an emotion they may have trouble with. I had times when I remember as a child going through incredibly sad moments (through a stressful period of my early childhood) and this book would have really helped me to acknowledge what I was feeling. I know it would have helped me to know that it was okay to be feeling this emotion and it would have probably made it easier to speak about too. This is a great book to help children today process any sadness they might be feeling, and it does have a positive ending.
What do you think about this book? Do you like books like these that help children to understand their emotions? Let me know what you think in the comments below 🙂
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