Books like The Mixed-Up Chameleon
By Eric Carle
For the kid who's always trying on someone else's superpower — this book gives that wish a body, piece by piece, until it's almost too much to carry. Playful, curious, a little wild, and quietly reassuring.
Voted the most beautiful bird in the forest, a glossy blackbird is begged by the red, yellow, blue, and green birds to paint markings of black onto their feathers so they can be beautiful too.
After spotting three dazzling mermaids on the subway, a boy transforms his home into a lagoon of imagination, fashioning his own mermaid costume from a curtain and some ferns.
A young girl with skin the color of midnight longs to be lighter like her mother and sister, until a shooting star's story about the sisters Night and Day changes how she sees herself.
A hotel welcomes every kind of feeling as a guest — loud Anger who needs room to shout, quiet Sadness who sometimes floods the bathroom, wandering Gratitude — and never turns anyone away.
A zombie girl who loves to dance enrolls in a ballet class for human girls, but stage fright before her first recital makes her fear her moans and groans will scare everyone away.
A crayon labeled red is actually blue inside, and no matter how hard he tries — drawing strawberries, mixing orange with a classmate — he just can't make red marks, until a new friend sees him differently.
A young cartographer leaves behind hand-drawn maps of his old neighborhood — the school, the chicken coop, the best skylight spot for a bed — as a gift for the next child moving into his house.
A lonely old man sets out to find one pretty cat but can't choose among the millions, billions, and trillions he finds on a hillside — so he brings them all home.
On a distant planet, a red Smed and a blue Smoo fall in love despite their families' rule that Smeds and Smoos never mix, sending both sides on a journey that tests old prejudices.
A curious fox sets out just to watch a mysterious parade of animals heading somewhere unknown, freeing a caged pair of doves along the way, until he finds his reason for joining them waiting by a great wooden ship.
A young girl in Ukraine refuses to eat borsch, no matter how hard the grandmothers of Kiev try to persuade her — but after immigrating to America, she finds herself missing the very soup she once despised.
An awkward naked mole rat with thick glasses and a love of interpretive dance and fungus identification goes looking for other mushroom-obsessed friends who understand her.
