Big Bright Feelings: Ruby's Worry

What’s it about?

The story.

Ruby is a happy child. Then one day she finds a worry. It's small at first, so small she can almost ignore it. But it follows her everywhere, and grows, and the bigger it gets the less she can enjoy anything at all. Ruby looks at the other children and they all seem fine. Nobody else has a worry like this. Tom Percival makes the worry visible: a yellow scribble that begins small and expands across the pages until it is enormous, pressing in from every side. The resolution comes when Ruby finds another child who also has a worry, and when they share them, both worries shrink. It is the mechanism of every therapeutic conversation about anxiety, rendered in picture-book form without losing any of its truth. One of the most consistently recommended books for children who struggle with worry: precise about the experience, gentle in the resolution, and entirely without condescension. The book parents reach for when a child says 'I can't stop thinking about it.' The breakout title of the Big Bright Feelings series, and its best-known entry point.