5 Picture Books From Unexpected Points of View

The Wolf Who Visited the Land of Fairy Tales, by Orianne Lallelmand and Eleonore Thuillier
When the Wolf decides to bake an apple cake and share it with the others at the spring picnic, he needs a little help: he doesn’t know how to bake! He heads to the forest to ask the creatures he encounters for baking advice, and he can’t understand why everyone is freaking out, from a little girl wearing a red hooded coat to a red hen to three little pigs.

Seriously, Cinderella is So Annoying, by Trisha Speed Shaskan and Gerald Claude Guerlais
This book gives Cinderella’s “wicked” stepmother a chance to tell her side of the story. According to her, Cinderella is prone to telling “wild stories.” After the stepmother marries Cinderella’s dad, he leaves immediately on a business trip. The stepmother finds the house covered in dust, and Cinderella tells her stories nonstop about how “robins and sparrows are my friends” and that the squirrels did the laundry. Cinderella is sick and has lost her voice on the night of the royal ball, which is why her stepmother tells her to stay home in bed. Don’t believe the lies that girl spreads—I mean, she claims that a pumpkin turned into a carriage.

There’s a Hair in My Dirt: A Worm’s Story, by Gary Larson
If you thought teenage humans were unique in their ability to complain about their lives to their parents, you haven’t met the little worm in this hilarious, science fact-filled story by Gary Larson. When he finds a hair in his plate of dinner dirt, the little worm has an outburst. “I hate being a worm! We’re the lowest of the low! Bottom of the food chain! Bird food! Fish bait!” The little worm’s dad tells a long, weird story to try to convince him that being a worm is, in fact, tops.

Hello, Monster!, by Clémentine Beauvais and Maisie Paradise Shearring
This new book tells the story of a little boy whose mother always tells him to go play with another boy at the playground who’s alone in the sandbox. The narrator is dubious, however. What if that isn’t a little boy at all, but a monster in disguise? This book is topsy-turvy not because it tells the story from an unusual perspective, but because there’s no tidy moral at the end of it. After taking a wild flight of fancy about the strange boy he doesn’t know, the narrator chooses not to speak to him, after all.

The Very Smart Pea and the Princess-to-be, by Mini Grey
Okay, we’ve heard from wolves, stepmothers and worms, but who will speak up for the vegetable community? Leave it to the star of this story, a pea born in humble circumstances in the royal vegetable garden, who nevertheless knows that “Somehow, I would be important.” The crabby queen has been nagging her 34-year-old son to get married or he’ll lose his allowance. When he rejects every princess he meets for a year, the queen insists that a real princess will be able to feel a pea under a pile of 20 mattresses as she sleeps, and that he should marry the first one who does. When none of the potential princesses can feel the pea, the pea has to take matters into his own hands.