Pretty Ugly

K-Gr 2–This seems like a familiar, fractured fairy tale at first glance, but pushes its preternatural premise further with an unexpected and welcome narrative thrust. A family of ogres prizes their ugliness above all else, praising their pig-tailed, pointy-eared, wartnosed daughter Anna for her poor manners and voracious hunger for hardware (she chomps on nails at dinner). Her most uncouth behavior, in their eyes, is making objectively adorable (or horrifying, depending on viewers' aesthetic sensibilities) porcelain doll-like faces. One day, her face sticks like that, and she’s left rosy-cheeked and doe-eyed indefinitely, much to her dismay. After locking herself in the woodshed, she comes to that old chestnut of self-understanding: true beauty is found on the inside. In a flourish straight out of a horror film, she literally turns herself inside out, revealing the hot pink, googly-eyed, globby-brained monster lurking just beneath her saccharine exterior. And that’s it! This simple story, clearly quirky from the get-go, still manages to shock in its final turn, so prepare readers to be slightly freaked. In his picture book debut, Sedaris’s familiar mix of sentimentality and acerbic wit shines through without coming off as self-indulgent. Falconer’s sparse, goofily grotesque illustrations leave large swaths of white space for readers to settle into the story, using a calm, sedate visual style to emphasize the contrast of the book’s brash neon finale.