Shrek!
Shrek! is a children’s book written and illustrated by William Steig in the year 1990 and is a parody of fairy tales. It’s about an ogre named Shrek who loves being a monster, scaring villagers and stealing pheasants from peasants. And Shrek’s roar scares off knights, dragons and thunderstorms. After a talking donkey tells Shrek that there’s a woman who is as ugly as he is in a castle called The Castle of the Nutty Night, Shrek decides to go there to marry her. On the way Shrek falls asleep and has a dream about children thinking he’s cute instead of scary and that scares Shrek into waking up. When Shrek makes it to the castle, he fights the Nutty Night and wins. Then, Shrek walks into a hall of mirrors and is scared by all the reflections there because of how ugly they are but then he realizes that they’re all actually reflections of him and is happy that he is that ugly. When Shrek meets the ogress and she’s as ugly as he is, they fall in love, get married and start terrorizing villages together and they live “hideously ever after”. In 2001, DreamWorks Animation made the movie Shrek loosely based on this book.
