bad

It's just not okay for a book to basically trample over a kid's wishes, especially when it's really a simple thing that he's asking for. She needs to find something else that she can do for him, or with him, that is the equivalent to her of kissing that he at least tolerates, if not enjoys. Does he like gentle kisses? Hugs? High-fives?

I had high hopes for this book. I really did. I came away from it feeling like this is not a book for children, it's for the adult reader.

This book would be much better (although still probably not an amazing book) if Donkey-Donkey found his own inner strength at the end in accepting his ears the way they were at the beginning. Maybe even found some benefit to holding them that way, or their length, instead of just finding problems with every other way and defaulting to the original because 'that's what donkeys do.' Or maybe he could have found some crazy way of holding his ears that nobody else did, and become a local attraction. I don't know.

What it boils down to is, don't have respect for people who treat you kindly. The only two opinions the children can have for the teacher are disrespect, or fear. Really, the best relationship between an adult and a child is for them to have mutual respect and understanding of the other's position. It's obviously a lot harder for children to understand the position of the adult.

It's just so bizarre, the things that the author decides to include and the things that they decide to leave out. It's not very useful if all it does is tackle the easy part. If I bought this book hoping that it would help me explain sex to my children, I would be sorely disappointed. Because it does not do that. It provides an extremely brief overview of the biological components of making babies, and that's it. I respect their attempt to be inclusive of all genders, but their execution leads to distortion and confusion of statistically relevant facts.

If the mother were punished for her callous treatment of her children, especially the youngest, then maybe her behavior would act as an anti-example. But as it is, with no repentance or personal consequences (only her eldest son suffers for it), I don't want this read to my kids. I don't want her behavior modeled for them. I don't want them to worry I'll ignore them if they fall down a well, or treat them differently based on their age alone. And I don't want them to feel that either of them is worthless. Not even in a relative sense.

How she planned on keeping up this charade isn't discussed. Sure, the king happens to stop at three rooms full of gold for unknown reasons, but what if he had continued? What horrible things would the miller's daughter be forced to trade away?

This book is only bad because of Helen Bannerman's original racist drawings and the names of the characters. The characters don't act in a particularly stereotypical way, and the message of the book isn't inherently bad. Clearly the story is set in India, and I don't know why Bannerman decided to draw the characters as awful stereotypes from the American South.

The more I think about this book and the more I learn about it, the worse it gets. On the other hand, I could see an updated version of this book becoming mildly popular. Maybe someone bounces a bouncy ball and it keeps going? It doesn't need to be a gun.

Who gets to decide what's beautiful? Because I would imagine that swans find cygnets beautiful. It's just that he's in the wrong company for his beauty to be recognized. Why do humans even think swans are pretty, and why does the ugly duckling give a fig whether humans think he's pretty?