The Ugly Duckling
Author: Hans Christian Andersen
Copyright: 1844
Pages: 3-8
Reading Level: 4
Genre: Fairy Tale
Rating **

Summary:
So I am going to give you the short version of this tale. By a lake, on a farm there is a young mother duck whose eggs have all hatched but one. Everyone tells her to abandon the egg, that it must be a turkey egg but she will not. Finally her egg hatches, but this “thing” is not pretty like her other children, but ugly. To test and see if it is a duck she jumps in the water and has the other ducklings follow suit, assuming the ugly one will not know how to swim, but he does. So the mother takes all her ducklings (including the ugly one) and goes up to the farm. Everyone on the farm is mean to the ugly one. The people, the other animals, and even the own ducklings siblings are mean to him. So he fly away. He finds a pond and he stays there, and the other ducks say he can stay as long as he doesn’t try and marry anyone in their family. Then some other ducks approach him one day, and ask him to be their protection to another pond when gun fire breaks out. The guns keep going and blood is falling into the pond, and the dogs are coming to get the ducks, but they don’t even bother him. After the gun fire is over, he flies to another place and stays in a cabin with a woman for a while. The cat and the hen tell him that he is not use and that he is weird because he wants to swim. They tell him to learn to purr or to lay eggs and he will be worth something, so one day he flies off to another pond and stays by himself. There he sees swan, and he feels a connection, but they fly away and then winter comes, and the pond freezes over and a man comes to save him. He wakes up in the mans house and when he finally gets out it is spring. He comes then flies and finds a grow of swans. He knows they will kill him because he is ugly, but he decides that is better than having everyone be mean. But instead of killing him, they welcome him because he has turned into a beautiful swan.

Who would benefit from reading this?
This is a good story for kids to read because it shows that true beauty comes from the inside. While also pointing out that things are better after you have had to work for them, than if you were just handed them. A fun story for kids, but I would suggest the shortened version.

Potential problems/conflicts:
There is a lot of cruelty is this story as well as it may be too long for kids to stay focused.

My reaction:
I thought I knew this story but I was wrong…I only knew about a fourth of it. I knew the beginning, and I knew the end, but somehow in all the stories of The Ugly Duckling I had been read, everything else had been left out. Honestly though, I don’t think I missed anything. The main point of the story was still conveyed in the shortened versions that I assume stemmed from this author. Good story, and even better moral, but long.