Christine Baldacchino

Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine dress is a beautiful book teaching its readers that anyone can pull off a dress, heels, and nail polish - even if the dress is tangerine! I want to point out, though, a key difference between this book and another I read this week: I Am Jazz. Although both Morris and Jazz enjoy wearing dresses, Jazz openly states she's a girl where Morris very plainly tells his classmates at one point he is a boy. Both characters are 100% valid in their gender identities show more regardless of what they choose to wear. Some boys wear dresses and nail polish. Some of those boys even end up being straight! Clothes are clothes and this book embraces this fact. show less

A truth I learned from this book: it doesn't matter what gender you are or what you're wearing or whether or not anyone thinks what you're wearing matches your gender (whatever that means); if you have a spaceship, and its got elephants on it, and your cat has a space helmet on, then you are winning the imagination game and everyone wants to be friends with you. And if someone still has a problem with your tangerine dress and heels, you just ignore them and continue living in space.

Morris has a fondness for a particular tangerine colored dress in the classroom dress-up. It's the same color as his mother's beautiful hair and he loves the way it crinkles when he wears it. In the class, another girl wants a turn wearing the dress, demanding he give it up because he shouldn't even be wearing it since he is a boy. Other boys shun him because they don't want to lose any of their "boyishness" by hanging out with him. Morris stays home because he feels so bad. When he returns show more to school, he is determined not to let the other children say what he can and cannot do. In the end, Morris feels confident about wearing the dress and being himself.

The illustrations were really striking in this book. Bright tangerine popped against mostly black and white pictures. I felt that enamored feeling for the color tangerine as I read the story. Boys not being allowed to wear dresses in our society is a common message, but we really should be open and allowing of everyone to express themselves through clothing. show less

This story follows a young boy named Morris who loves his Mom, his cat Moo, going to school, and playing dress up in a tangerine dress. He wears it because it reminds him of his mom's hair and the color of the sun, because of the sounds it makes, and because he likes how it makes him feel. His classmates don't understand this, however, and begin to exclude him from activities and make fun of him. Everyone insists that boys can't wear dresses, and some of the boys in Morris' class build a show more spaceship and don't let Morris join them since, according to them, "astronauts don't wear dresses." All of the bullying starts to get to Morris, and he stays home from school the next day. He then has a dream about going to space in his tangerine dress; there he sees his cat Moo, as well as tigers that fit in the palm of your hand and elephants that tower over you. When he wakes up, he paints a picture of his dream and shows his mom, who asks who the little boy in the tangerine dress is. Happy that she noticed, Morris tells his mom that it's him. He ends up going to school the next day, where he builds his own spaceship and puts his painting on the front of it. The other boys are amazed and ask to join, and Morris lets them. They have so much fun, and the boys realize that maybe it doesn't matter if other boys choose to wear dresses. When one of the girls tells Morris that boys don't wear dresses, Morris simply replies, "this boy does." I think this book is great to give to younger kids not only to teach them that everyone has different preferences in clothing, but also to teach them that they aren't restricted to wearing a certain style of clothing. In my opinion, clothing has no gender, and if boys want to wear dresses, they should be able to without being judged. It's great to see books like this being written now, since I know when I was younger I had similar views about clothes as the ones I have now, but other people didn't seem to agree with me. Hopefully, more people will think like this author, and let people wear what they want! show less