Ugly Pie

Author: Lisa Wheeler
Publication Year: 2010
Type of Book: Picture Book

Ugly Pie is about a bear who wakes up one day craving some pie. Not just any pie though, he wants ugly pie. As the Ol' Bear is out on a walk he stops at his neighbors houses after he smells something delicious coming from inside. Hoping that they would be cooking up some ugly pie he goes and asks what smells so good. The bear finds himself disappointed after each visit because he has yet to find himself some ugly pie. Even though his neighbors didn't have any ugly pie they gave him the ugliest thing they had. Along the way he collected sour green apples, wrinkled red raisins, and bumpy brown walnuts. The bear was sad that after his walk he still didn't have any ugly pie to treat himself to. He then had the idea to use all of the ingredients he collected along the way to make his own ugly pie. The ugly pie smelled so good that each of his neighbors decided to go to his house to see what he was cooking. Once the ugly pie was finished cooking the bear got to finally enjoy his ugly pie with the company of some great neighbors.

I thought that this was a really cute book. I really liked how the author incorporated rhymes into the story. The bear would chant about ugly pie throughout the book and the chants were very creative and catchy. Another part of the story that I thought was unique was that at the end of the book there was a recipe for ugly pie. As someone who likes to cook this was a great bonus to the story. I would love to try making ugly pie. If I had a class that I read this book to it would be fun for the whole class to make ugly pie together. Even if we couldn't make an actual pie together as a class, students could make a recipe for their own ugly pie and then draw it. This could even be tied into a lesson about different genres of writing such a recipes and how to books. The class could then pull together all of their ugly pie recipes into one cook book. The illustrations in the story were very interesting and almost looked like water colors. They weren't crips and clear images like some illustrations in books are. The images were all blended and and soft looking.

I would recommend this book for teachers to use as a read aloud or a book for parents to read to their children. Young children would like the story line but the words are too challenging for their reading level.
Image References
http://spiralmontessorimama.blogspot.com/2010/10/ugly-pie.html