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This is the story of a family with four boys. The mother, pregnant with the fifth, is hoping for a girl- and they get Claude, an intelligent, sweet child who wears dresses and earrings and pink bikinis. His parents only want their children to be happy.
Claude finds kindergarten troubling. Rosie, the mother, finds their predicament troubling as she identifies with a case in the ER. Penn, their as yet unpublished father, helps process their lives through his ongoing bedtime story.
At one point, th ...more
Claude finds kindergarten troubling. Rosie, the mother, finds their predicament troubling as she identifies with a case in the ER. Penn, their as yet unpublished father, helps process their lives through his ongoing bedtime story.
At one point, th ...more

Jan 23, 2024
Kemlo
rated it
it was amazing
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
fiction,
gender-identity-expression
What a beautiful, thoughtful, compassionate story about love (romantic love, love of parents for their children, love between siblings, love of friends). Although at the center of the story is a child whose gender identity doesn’t fit neatly into the binary (Claude/Poppy), the book doesn’t stop there. It also depicts the wonders and heartaches of being a parent, a sibling (four of the five children in the family identify as boys), and a human being like any other who is trying to figure out who
...more

really enjoyed this book and it made me stop to think. These are some of my favorite types of books. It took a bit longer to finish because often the situations that were experienced by Rosie, Penn and Claude/ Poppy were so real that I had to take time and think about what my reaction might be, how the current culture got to this point, and how would i be going forward. The difficulties the family faced were real and very well done. The processes of their lives were real, true and believable. Wh
...more

Jul 11, 2018
Toni
rated it
it was amazing
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
lgbtq,
pacific-north-west
