We love the Bad Seed trilogy. They are picture books we find ourselves recommending to other parents at the school gate.
Three books, in the order they arrived. The Bad Seed came in 2017, The Good Egg and The Cool Bean both in 2019. Jory John writes and Pete Oswald paints. There are two further Food Group titles (The Couch Potato and The Smart Cookie) which we like but do not include in the trilogy run.
The trick is to make the character the emotion. The bad seed is a sunflower seed who opens by admitting he is bad, and then explains where the badness came from. The Good Egg has spent years being good for everyone else and is about to crack. The Cool Bean is a bean on the outside of the in-crowd, wanting to get in. The feelings are not embedded in an allegorical story; the feelings are the story, wearing a shell or an apron.
For a five-year-old who has not yet got the vocabulary to say “I feel bad because something hurt me”, a picture of a sunflower seed who says exactly that is a handle. That is what these books do. Reception teachers use them for feelings-circle sessions and have told us the books carry more weight than a lot of purpose-built PSHE material.
Pete Oswald paints the cover of The Good Egg with an egg carton that looks like a prison. That kind of single-image detail is how you tell a picture book has had its time put in.