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BOOK: The Strange Appeal of the Odd Man Out
By : Monisha Sugla and Sarah Muñoz
A long time ago, Hansel and Gretel, those two picture-perfect angelic siblings, took a stroll around the woods and found themselves facing an ugly, scary witch. But who was she, really? Maybe just a woman who’d been tossed aside by society because she was “strange-looking” or simply marched to the beat of a different drummer.
Nowadays, the witch would probably be the heroine of the story and have her own movie deal, as more and more children’s books celebrate the unique and uncommon while they tickle the funny bones of parents, as well. Take the unusual case of Benjy in The Boy Who Looked Like Lincoln. He didn’t have many friends and kids made fun of him—he did look a lot like Lincoln, down to the wart and beard. But one day, his parents took him to Camp What-cha-ma-call-it: The Camp for Kids Who Look Like Things, a place for kids who were a bit different—some had a horse’s head and others looked like toasters. And Benjy learned that he was not alone in the world. When he went back to school, he didn’t care what he looked like anymore, because what you look like is always something special.
Who you are is special, too. In Diary of a Worm, Doreen Cronin—author of the hysterical Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type—chronicles the ups and downs of a kid worm’s life: worrying about fishing season, children playing hopscotch and sneaking up on humans to make them scream. There are good things and bad things about being a worm, but they have a purpose: they help the earth breathe. It turns out that worms are pretty cool and have more in common with humans than we think—like most of us, they make macaroni necklaces in grade school. Our worm hero writes in his diary, “It’s not always easy being a worm. We’re very small, and sometimes people forget that we’re even here. But, like Mom always says, the earth never forgets we’re here.”
If given the chance, the aforementioned witch could’ve told us a long time ago that it’s not what you’re given, it’s what you make of what you have. And the witch had a nice little gingerbread house to show for it.
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