Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress by Christine Baldacchino (review)

Morris loves his classroom’s dress-up center, where he can wear the tangerine dress, the one that reminds him of his mom’s red hair and that goes “swish, swish, swish when he walks and crinkle, crinkle, crinkle when he sits down.” The girls in his class, though, say that boys don’t wear dresses, and the other boys agree, barring Morris from their pretend spaceship. Morris stays home from school one day to recover, where his dreams and subsequent paintings of space-faring elephants give him the confidence to return to school with his own spaceship plans. Although the text is lengthy, it is poetically whimsical (“Morris Micklewhite had a mom named Moira and a cat named Moo”), and it conveys Morris’s emotional vulnerability with only the slightest edge of sentimentality. Unlike some more messagey titles on the subject, this one provides Morris with a personality beyond his dress-loving nature, making him enjoyable literary company. His imagination is captured by the Photoshop-assembled illustrations in charcoal, pastel, and watercolor, softly outlined images in dreamy colors of round-faced characters and bold cats and tigers. The dress itself has an ethereal quality: without outlines, its crayonish bleeding into the rest of the pictures gives it—and Morris—a larger-than-life presence.