I'm a Girl!

PreS-Gr 1—A wrongheaded picture book attempts to celebrate "girl power" and the rejection of traditional gender roles but ends up perpetuating stereotypes. A blue watercolor donkey careens through the pages, speeding, spilling food, banging drums, and barging into others. Every energetic, loud, or careless action prompts a witness to mistake her for a boy, but she proudly responds, "I'm a girl!" each time, usually more than once. While the narration asserts that behaviors like reading books about ships and wanting to win races are not the exclusive purview of men, the work creates a world in which doing any of these things—even riding a scooter at speed—marks the actor as male. The damaging fallacy extends in every direction, though, as the bystanders' sometimes derisive comments, which assume that she's male ("Ugh! Boys are so messy."), support an additional set of (binary) gender stereotypes. The final spreads include a red lion and a boy who dons a grass skirt and shakes maracas along to the donkey's guitar-playing, as the two celebrate their independent thinking. "Being us is SUPER!" they declare while repeatedly proclaiming their genders, at which point the late introduction of a new character stands as the least of the book's issues.