The Ugly Five

My daughter loves this book and all the other ones by this writer and artist team

Her books have such great pictures and funny text.

Look, this book didn’t sit right with me the first time I read it. I didn’t love it the second time either. By the third time… It grew on me. My 2.5 year old didn’t like this book til we’d had it 2 months and I forcibly read it to him (AKA, reading despite him yelling NO MAMA NO FIVE). My son LOVES books. He’s advanced for a 2.5 year old. Suddenly, he wanted to read this book. He doesn’t forget so he recalled the story. Now he loves it. This book has grisly content and illustrations. It’s teaching moment. “It’s not nice to call others names.” “It’s not nice to judge people based on looks.” “Some people are different than us but not wrong.” Use it to your advantage. It’s an great book overall!

Another wonderful story by Ms Donaldson. Good lesson as always. Can actually pull my four year old grandson away from his hot wheels and legos for her books.

I love Julia Donaldson's books - fun to read to my grandchildren and the illustrations are great for finding little details such as spiders, bugs, birds, etc. However my grandson had a strange reaction to this book (he is 2.5 years old and LOVES many of her other books and wants to have them re-read constantly). He didn't really like the creatures calling themselves ugly. I explained that ugly was like yucky. I don't think he'd ever thought of another person or animal as "yucky" and hadn't heard the term ugly. So....after one read of this book, he only wants to look at the pictures and of course loves the last spread where all of the babies love their parents.On the other hand, my 6 year old granddaughter loved the story and it led to a good discussion about not making fun of people because of the way they look....so I'd recommend this for kids who have some pre-school experience and may have seen the way other children treat one another unkindly. My 2.5 year old hasn't had much of that worldly experience yet! He did like the comparison of the animals on the pages after the story (i.e. the leopard and the leopard tortoise) and he loved counting the various birds, frogs, and meerkats on the pages throughout the book.

Another awesome book from this creative team. My son love all these books and this was just the latest. The illustrations are wonderful and the sing-song rhyming is great for teaching to read along.

Fun book with lots of new and interesting animal names to teach toddler. Cute ending.

A fun engaging book. Excellent illustrations.