I can't decide how I feel about this one -- I like the idea that everyone has bad days, and it can sometimes seem like when we are jerks, it's something outside ourselves that overwhelms us. However, I don't really think that it makes sense to teach kids that there is an outside force, and that it's not all that controllable, because ultimately they have to figure out how to deal with the snurtch, and "it's not me" isn't going to get them very far. ( )

so, my son just read this to me, here's his review.

It was a little silly.I liked the pictures. It was funny. And thats it.

It was a pretty good book, my son definitely has a snurtch, and he actually kind of agreed with me, which was amazing. ( )

"Ruthie has a problem at school," the narrator of The Snurtch tells us, and it isn't her fellow students, her classroom, or her academic subjects. No, her problem is the titular Snurtch. A nasty individual, one who isn't good at taking instruction, but who excels at making itself unpleasant to her classmates, the Snurtch follows Ruthie wherever she goes, often getting her into trouble in class and making her unpopular on the playground. When Ruthie shares a picture of the Snurtch in class, the response of her classmates, together with the knowledge that they too are troubled by such creatures, reconciles her to her school life...

The second collaboration from author Sean Ferrell and illustrator Charles Santoso, following upon I Don't Like Koala, this entertaining picture-book addresses an all-too-common problem in young children - the inability to control feelings of anger, aggression, and spite - in an innovative and creative fashion. Here these feelings are externalized, made into a creature known as the Snurtch, allowing young readers to visualize the problem, and to see how bad behavior is as much a problem for the wrongdoer, as for those who must deal with her. I liked the way that Santoso depicted the Snurtches here, showing them in vibrant but semi-transparent color, as this emphasizes their almost ghost-like, haunting quality. I would recommend The Snurtch to anyone looking for children's stories that address negative emotions, and how to deal with them. ( )