WHEN YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DON'T WANT

Fleming’s picture book offers youngsters tips on how to gauge what they truly want.

Professor Finelly McTueful, a wizard with a long gray beard and brown skin, offers his advice while hovering on a cloud above Egyptian pyramids, a polar iceberg, and, finally, on a desk in front of a blackboard. When you know what you don’twant, he says, then “in that moment precisely, // you’ll know what you DO want, / you’ll know it concisely.” By offering examples such as wanting a bully to be kind, wanting a liar to tell the truth, and wanting health when one is sick, the professor professes that knowing what you do want is “like having a map, / guiding you out / of that negative trap.” A pale-skinned boy then applies positive thinking to refocus on things that make him happy: his friends, a day at the beach, jokes, and imagination. Geyer’s full-color cartoon illustrations use light and shade to add nuance to the story’s examples. The little boy’s expressions in the illustrations when things go wrong validate his negative feelings, adding depth to the book’s overall emphasis on positivity. The rhyming and rhythm in Fleming’s text are effortless, occasionally adding challenging words to the mostly simple vocabulary (concisely, brutish).

An effervescent, rhyming case for positive thinking.