Horace and Morris but Mostly Delores

"It’s so great. One day at the library my daughter said, “Oh Mom, I want to see if they have this book that I read at school – you’re going to love it.” I had heard of it but assumed it was really spinachy, and I hate spinachy children’s books. Books that bear the weight of an agenda often are short on story and character development. But Horace and Morris but Mostly Dolores didn’t set up stereotypes just to knock them down. It’s a really engaging story about three mice – two boys and a girl. They’re friends who experience peer pressure to stop being friends. For a while the boys go play in a boys’ clubhouse and Dolores goes to the girls’ clubhouse where she does all the things that girls are supposed to do, like having tea. So the friends are segregated into gender ghettos, as so often happens among kids. Dolores is unhappy and she wants to go do something else, like build a fort. But the girl mice say, “No, no, no.” So she breaks away to re-engage with Horace and Morris, bringing one other girl with her. Dolores convinces Horace and Morris to come play with her and they bring along one other boy mouse. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Horace and Morris but Mostly Dolores presents gender dynamics with a little more complexity and a little more realism than a typical agenda book. So it’s about how each creature can be an individual and how kids can find common interests that aren’t defined by gender. I can’t answer that in a broad-scale way. I know that some educators are attuned to these issues because they write to me. The hyper-segmentation of play by gender concerns them and so does the prepackaged images of gender that surround young kids. One mother sent me a photograph of a Thanksgiving art project in her daughter’s preschool. The kids had to decorate paper turkeys. The boys chose to dress their turkeys like all different sorts of sports players, superheroes and professions. The girls, with the exception of this woman’s daughter, all dressed their turkeys as princesses. It was a good illustration to me of the hold that these archetypes have on girls. Kids need open-ended play as they’re developing, not commercialised scripts that inhibit their individuality and flatten their imaginations."