Anne-Gaëlle Balpe

A young boy describes his father's job at The Bureau of Weights and Measures in this French picture-book, explaining how everything must be carefully calibrated and quantified each day. But when the boy comes home in an indefinably bad mood, it poses a challenge: how to measure it? The boy and his father invent all sorts of contraptions for measuring emotions, but they find that their machines don't improve people's lives...

Originally published in French as Le bureau des poids et des mesures, this is an engaging examination of emotions, and how impervious they are to quantification - how measurement itself is irrelevant to them, and an inadequate tool for understanding them. The artwork by illustrator Vincent Mahé has a certain retro charm, utilizing a limited color palette, and what looks like some sort of block-print medium. Recommended to anyone looking for an unconventional picture-book about emotions.… (mer)