"Toad Heaven," Morris Gleitzman, Puffin Books; 2002; 192 pp.

Humans are always complaining about how unfair life is. Limpy is a cane toad, but he thinks it's unfair, too. For starters, no one likes him (except his family). Female cane toads don't think he's much of a looker. (Cane toads are ugly enough, as it is, so if you're an ugly cane toad, you've really got problems.) He lives in Queensland, Australia, and spends most of his time fleeing humans.

Admittedly, Limpy is paranoid. His home is near a highway, and he thinks that every car that whizzes past is trying to plaster toads to the asphalt -- and he's got plenty of flattened "rellies" to show for it.)

But you can't entirely blame Limpy for being so skittish: Humans do run over cane toads. They also smash them, drug them, try to eat them, and even turn dead ones into souvenirs. In fact, Limpy's kind is so disliked by humans that Australian scientists are always looking for ways to exterminate cane toads. (This is typical of fickle humans, who first brought the toads into Australia from Hawaii to destroy the crop-damaging grayback beetle, and then decided that they were taking up too much space on the giant Australian continent.)