Ugly, the Book

Given my recent experience with young adult fiction, my knowledge of Donna Jo Napoli's twistedly re-told fairy tales, and my propensity to see signs in everything recently ("Hey, I found this book with a duckling on the cover at the library bird sale during bird year and I just happened to read it the night before Aster's IEP meeting amidst discussions about delays, disabilities and differences due to pediatric stroke,") I was expecting to find some sort of painful, not-fitting-in growing-up allegory in Ugly.

Napoli's Ugly, however, is a straight re-telling of the ugly duckling, narrated by the bird from before its yolk sac was reabsorbed until it is a year old.  There are no overt messages about special needs, homosexuality, or the cruelty of teenagers, but, as with all re-tellings, I'm sure one could find them there, and I'm certainly not going to advocate for a decrease in empathy and compassion.  Still, ror a North American reader, Ugly does have a pretty extreme twist.

Neither ducklings nor swans.
Kansas, late May, 2015

The bird is born in Tasmania.  It migrates north before the July winter.  I'm a little embarrassed by how much that really did throw me.