cover image THE UGLY TRUCKLING

THE UGLY TRUCKLING

David Gordon, . . HarperCollins, $15.99 (32pp) ISBN 978-0-06-054600-7

Gordon (Construction Countdown ) reinvents Hans Christian Andersen's The Ugly Duckling for the vroom-vroom set. Instead of a duck turned swan, his protagonist is a little airplane born into a family of trucks on the Western plains. Depicted as a wide-eyed, yam-shaped flyer with an adorable propeller nose, the Ugly Truckling is teased mercilessly by her siblings because "[her] wheels were small and narrow. She didn't have a strong, flat bed. And her chrome did not shine brightly under the stars." So she runs away, approaching a tractor, cow and windmill in her quest to find out who she is. The answer comes when she spots a flock of airplanes ("She wasn't an ugly truckling after all. She was a beautiful airplane"), and she flies off with them into the sunset. Employing desert colors, big-sky vistas and high-impact aerial perspectives, Gordon's painterly illustrations, coupled with the cute-as-a-button characters, will rev the engines of preschoolers obsessed with all things mechanical. But in reinterpreting Andersen's tale as a melancholy search for identity ("I'm not a tractor. I'm not a cow. I'm not a windmill. And I don't think I'm a truck either. I don't know who I am"), Gordon sets up a confusing contradiction with the cheerful illustrations. His truckling-duckling concept is clever but may be off the mark for this age group. Ages 3-7. (June)