By Aaron Blabey
A plain little pony ties a carrot to her head, gets buried in spilled pink paint and glitter, and wakes up a world-famous unicorn who quickly wishes she hadn't.
Thelma's an ordinary pony who badly wants to be a unicorn. She finds a carrot, ties it to her head, and then a truck skids and dumps her in pink paint and glitter. Now she looks like the real thing, and the whole world goes wild for her. Crowds, screaming, sold-out stadiums. And here's the catch: being a famous unicorn turns out to be awful. She gets chased and grabbed at, and plenty of strangers are just plain mean about her for no reason at all. So Thelma washes the glitter off and heads home to her friend Otis, who liked her fine the whole time. It rhymes, it's thirty-two pages, and Blabey slips something a little sharp in under all that sparkle.
If your child's starting to think the pink sparkly books are for babies, this is the unicorn book that gets past that, and the one you'll actually enjoy reading out loud. The joke is that the unicorn's a fake, a carrot and some spilled paint, and that being the most famous unicorn alive is a nightmare. So your child gets the sparkle they came for and a punchline about it, all in the same thirty-two pages. It also holds up as they get older. A seven-year-old will laugh at it and never feel handled. And if you've already watched the Netflix version at home, the book is shorter and meaner, and it's fun to sit and argue about which one you like better.