Hostess: Susan
Attendees: Lori, Amy, Janna, Cheryl, Pam T, Allison, Michelle, Emily
*KIRKUS REVIEW 9/2016*
A big, brave, messy modern family struggles with the challenges of raising a transgender child.
“This is how it always is. You have to make these huge decisions on behalf of your kid, this tiny human whose fate and future is entirely in your hands, who trusts you to know what’s good and right and then to be able to make it happen. If…you make the wrong call, well, nothing less than your child’s entire future and happiness is at stake.” Claude Walsh-Adams is all of 3 years old when he announces what he wants to be when he grows up—a girl. It’s a particularly tricky case of “be careful what you wish for” for his doctor mom and novelist dad, already the parents of four boys when they roll the reproductive dice one last time. At home, barrettes and dresses are fine, but once he starts kindergarten as a boy, Claude becomes so miserable that, with the advice of a “multi-degree-social-working-therapist-magician,” his parents decide to let him become Poppy. “So, gender dysphoria,” says the bizarrely bouncy therapist. “Congratulations to you both! Mazel tov! How exciting!” The excitement takes a nasty turn when horrifying homophobic incidents convince Rosie that the family must leave Madison, Wisconsin, for the reputedly more enlightened Seattle, Washington. But rather than putting Seattle’s tolerance to the test, they keep Poppy’s identity a secret from even her closest friends, a decision that blows up in their faces when she hits puberty. Though well-plotted, well-researched, and unflaggingly interesting, the novel is cloying at times, with arch formulations, preachy pronouncements, and a running metafictional fairy tale. It’s worth putting up with the occasional too-much-ism for all the rest of what bright, brave author Frankel (Goodbye for Now, 2012) has to offer as the mother of a transgender second-grader in real life.
***Interview with Laurie Frankel on NPR (1/2017)***
This novel was inspired by the author's own experience as a mother of a transgender child. As thought-provoking a domestic novel as we have seen this year. what she hopes readers will get out of her book:"I think it is a topic that scares people and I think that in part that's because they haven't met anyone — or they don't know that they've met anyone — who is impacted by these issues. There are a lot of transgender people and there are even more people who are gender nonconforming, and these little kids are just kids. They are the least scary people you can imagine.
So one of the things that I hope is that people who read this book will read it and forget about the transgender issues and just be in the embrace of this family and realize that this family is like all families: They love and they keep secrets from one another and they protect one another and they struggle with how to do that and they have these challenges. And it's hard, but it isn't scary and it isn't abnormal at all."
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The subject matter of this novel was uncharted territory for our book club. It was our first time to read about anything having to do with transgender issues. Lots of discussion on multiple related topics! As much as this story focused on one boy-girl, the common plot was was very much about family, and the dynamics resulting from the transgender point..more clinically known as gender dysphoria. All in attendance read the book, (that may be a first for our humble little book club) A book well liked, we gave it a 4.1 star rating!
Next month March 7: The House of Broken Angels, by Luis Alberto Urrea
Hostess: Pam M
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