Books like Yuck! by Daniel R. Kelly

A tiny duckling and a clever pigeon clash over a hot dog in this playful picture book by Mo Willems, celebrating friendship, sharing, and light‑hearted competition for young readers.

1 volume (unpaged) : 24 cm

A porcupine named Fluffy meets a similarly misnamed rhinoceros and learns the joy of having a name that fits.

Emma, capturing her adventurous spirit, defies mean witches who block her potion-making, using culinary magic and animal allies to forge her own spell.

William Miller details our anxious relation to basic life processes; eating, excreting, fornicating, decaying, and dying. But disgust pushes beyond the flesh to vivify the larger social order with the idiom it commandeers from the sights, smells, tastes, feels, and sounds of fleshly physicality. Disgust and contempt, Miller argues, play crucial political roles in creating and maintaining social hierarchy. Democracy depends less on respect for persons than on an equal distribution of contempt. Disgust, however, signals dangerous division. Miller argues that disgust is deeply grounded in our ambivalence to life: it distresses us that the fair is so fragile, so easily reduced to foulness, and that the foul may seem more than passing fair in certain slants of light. When we are disgusted, we are attempting to set bounds, to keep chaos at bay. Of course we fail. But, as Miller points out, our failure is hardly an occasion for despair, for disgust also helps to animate the world, and to make it a dangerous, magical and exciting place.

Sadness has become the emotional anchor of Headquarters, weighed down by life’s sorrows. When her fellow Emotions try to pull her into any other feeling, she must revisit Riley’s happiest moments to discover if she can finally let go and find a happy ending.

A child learns that a persistent problem can transform into an unexpected gift, revealing courage, strength, and growth while encouraging readers to confront and understand their own challenges.