Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods---My Mother's, My Father's, and Mine

I admire what Howey did here. The book is honest without being remotely sensational. That is not easy with this subject matter. Because I admire the effort it pains me to not give a higher rating. The last 100+ pages were better, but the first half of this book was so dull. 90% of it should have been cut. I almost abandoned the read more than once. She tried so hard to show us how damaging her father's secret was to the family. and how freeing his coming out was for them that we had to slog through a bunch of really boring everyday dysfunction. Who wants to do that?

Dress Codes could have been interesting, but it jumped around too much in time: trying to tackle two parents' sets of childhoods, as well as the narrator, to make sense of the father's transformation of sexual identity and eventual sex change.
I felt awkward reading it, as if I were overhearing prurient family secrets.

Dress Codes could have been interesting, but it jumped around too much in time: trying to tackle two parents' sets of childhoods, as well as the narrator, to make sense of the father's transformation of sexual identity and eventual sex change.
I felt awkward reading it, as if I were overhearing prurient family secrets.

Dress Codes could have been interesting, but it jumped around too much in time: trying to tackle two parents' sets of childhoods, as well as the narrator, to make sense of the father's transformation of sexual identity and eventual sex change.
I felt awkward reading it, as if I were overhearing prurient family secrets.

Dress Codes could have been interesting, but it jumped around too much in time: trying to tackle two parents' sets of childhoods, as well as the narrator, to make sense of the father's transformation of sexual identity and eventual sex change.
I felt awkward reading it, as if I were overhearing prurient family secrets.