Big-bellied, hairy, clawed and gap-toothed yucklies may not be pretty and are also prone to bad habits, but they are very likable. They have fun exploring the world of humans, which they don’t always understand. One time they make an expedition to the art museum, where they find that humans really have no sense of what is beautiful, they have a picnic, climb trees, and try out proverbs. The curious, lively and outgoing yucklies like exploring, having fun and socializing, and their stories are dynamic and humorously intoned. Their strangeness, as seen from a human’s perspective, is where the comical twists and turns spring from. Likable stories, lightly underlined by the aesthetic of ugliness, are accompanied by illustrations by Zvonko Čoh, one of Slovenia’s finest illustrators, who makes himself wonderfully comfortable in exactly this type of text, full of bad habits, mud spots and the like. The Yucklies is a debut by Gaja Kos, who has worked in the field of children’s literature as a theorist, but mostly as a literary critic and editor.