Marilyn Courtot (Children's Literature)
It is often difficult for kids to talk about their feelings, especially anger. Bang offers a great opportunity for parents and kids to discuss anger and how Sophie handles it. The situation is typical; Sophie's sister has taken her toy, which makes her very angry. The vivid colors and illustrations likening Sophie to a volcano get the point across. So too does the resolution that Sophie finds, by escaping outdoors to climb her favorite tree. There she calms down and the world becomes a quieter place bathed in soothing green and blue. 1999, Scholastic, $15.95. Ages 2 to 7.

Janice M. Del Negro (The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, April 1999 (Vol. 52, No. 8))
Sophie loses a tug-of-war altercation with her sister over a stuffed monkey, and her anger propels her out of the house and into an anger-reducing run. After running, crying, climbing a tree, and being soothed by the breeze, Sophie feels better and goes home, where everyone is happy to see her. Bang has captured a young child’s uncontrollable eruption of anger in both language (“She kicks. She screams. She wants to smash the world to smithereens”) and images (when Sophie “roars a red, red roar,” she really does). In the scenes where Sophie’s rage is the impetus, the objects in the hotly colored illustrations are outlined in a flaming orange red; as Sophie calms down, the outline changes to a soothing pink, then to cool blues and greens, and finally to the cheerful yellow outlines of the domestic scenes. The double-page spreads are colored in a fiesta palette of warm yellows, saturated blues, and acid greens. In the closing spreads the yellow floors, orange walls, and pink woodwork combine to create a cozy home and hearth, where “everything is back together again and Sophie isn’t angry anymore.” Simple but effective, this title has a cohesive narrative of both words and images that could well be used in storytime programming or to start a discussion of what to do when you’re mad.

Kirkus (Kirkus Reviews, 1999)
When Sophie has to surrender one toy to her sister, stumbles over another toy, and gets no sympathy from her mother, she runs furiously out into the woods, first to cry, and then sit in a huge old beech, watching the ocean until the tempest abates. Bang (Common Ground, 1997, etc.) captures the intensity of Sophie's feelings with strong, broadly brushed forms and colors: images of flames and a volcano; blue eyes glaring up from a red background that looks as if it's exploding; then harmonious, leafy greens and browns; and concluding scenes of domestic amity. This briefly told behavior-management episode explores well-worked thematic territory, but as in Hiawyn Oram's Angry Arthur(1989)--and in contrast to the child in Betsy Everitt's Mean Soup (1992)--Sophie finds a way to cope with her anger, quite laudably, without a helping adult hand. 1999, Blue Sky/Scholastic, $15.95. © 1999