Lucinda Belinda Melinda McCool by Jeanne Willis is about a girl named Lucinda. She is always very pretty and very careful about what she looks like, but she is also very, very, very rude! She loves to tell everyone that they need to change the way they look, and be beautiful and perfect like her. If they aren’t exactly like her they can’t be friends. She tells her friends that their eyebrows are too bristly and that they have too big of a bottom and that their nails are dirty, or that they have to get rid of their warts or change their mustache. One day she meets an ugly monster. She isn’t frightened, but she says, “You’re ugly! So I have to fix you up and make you look perfect!” She makes the monster look beautiful, just like her. But the monster is still a monster, and the story doesn’t end well for Lucinda!

“’Friends?’ roared the monster. ‘Lucinda, you’re mad! Under this beautiful me, I’m still bad!’”

You will laugh at this funny story. Lucinda is so rude! So you will be happy that she doesn’t get a happy ending – it serves her right! In this story, even though there is a monster at the end, it is really Lucinda who is the monster! The pictures are really funny, especially the one where the monster is all painted and made pretty with lipstick and a hair bow! This story teaches you that you shouldn’t point out everything bad about people, or everything that you think you should change. What is inside is more important – it’s more about the way you act, than the way you look.

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