Moody Blues: My Cold Plum Lemon Pie Bluesy Mood by Tameka Fryer-Brown

I'M IN A MOOD.  A FEELING KIND OF MOOD.

A BEING KIND OF MOOD.

A PURPLE KIND OF MOOD.

THAT'S WHAT I'M IN.

And for Jamie, a purple mood is a good mood, an eating cold plums, drinking sweet grape juice kind of mood. A listening-to-my-music on the couch kind of mood that's hard to beat.

Until his big brothers order him out of their way so they can play video games in comfort!

Now his mood changes to a stormy, gloomy, gray mood. A don't-want-trouble mood.

But outside it's sunny and green all around, a fanciful green dragons and Jell-O mood.  Little Sis shares her new crayons, and it great until two big boys laugh at his drawings!

"AWWWW!  HOW SWEET!

IT'S CRAYON TIME!"

Now the mood is BLACK! A black hole of bad feelings!

And then a friend comes by, bouncing an orange basketball. And suddenly Jamie's mood is bright orange--a bip, bip, bop! SWISH! kind of mood.

It's that kind of day, bouncing from dark moods to bright moods, until it's time to run for home, a RED mood, a red-hot rush to beat the dark just before the streetlights come on with a warm yellow light. And it's a yellow mood inside--with his favorite chicken curry and warm laughter for dinner, a lemon pie kind of mood.

And even though it's his turn to do the dishes, Jamie's mood is finally a mellow, bluesy, sudsy, nice-to-be alone, it's-been-a-pretty-good-day kind of mood.

THAT'S WHAT I'M IN!

Tameka Fryer-Brown's My Cold Plum Lemon Pie Bluesy Mood (Viking, 2013) moves along in broken-rhythm blank verse poem that mirrors the natural ebb and flow of the up-and-down emotions of a kid's day while Shane Evans' illustrations fill in the action to augment the sparse text well. A natural to pair with Theodor Seuss Geisel's wonderful  My Many Colored Days, two books which provide insight into the normal everyday emotions that all of us feel.