Laurie Frankel has written a wonderful book about a quirky, smart, and loving family who is facing an issue that has wreaked havoc on schools across the nation, an issue that many of us don't understand and don't have experience with: gender dysphoria. What do you do if your little boy decides that he feels like he is a little girl instead? The answer for the Walsh-Adams family is: you do the best you can to make your child feel safe, loved, and supported. Isn't that what we all would strive to do? The problem is knowing what the best way to do that is. Penn and Rosie are the parents of four very active, energetic, and smart boys. When their fifth child, Claude, is born, they embrace and love him just as they did the rest of their rambunctious boys. By the time Claude is three, however, it is evident that he is different from their other children. He wants to wear dresses and put barrettes in his hair. In fact he wants to grow his hair long. He identifies with princesses in the fairy tales his father tells them all at bedtime. There are no easy answers in this novel; instead there's a conversation about the many ways people differ on all sorts of scales, gender being only one of them, and what's right for one person may not be right for another. I loved this family. They tried so hard to do the right thing for Claude, and the mistakes they made were done fully out of love. If this is a subject you're interested in looking at from a personal rather than a clinical level, this is a great place to start.review by
Kelly Currie
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