Bill’s New Frock

“Bill Simpson wakes up to find he's a girl, and worse, his mother makes him wear a frilly pink dress to school. How on earth is he going to survive a whole day like this? Everything just seems to be different for girls”.

Bill’s New Frock is a children’s book which superbly examines gender roles and how children are treated differently because of it by adults and his peers.  There is no magic spell or explanation, it just is. Instead we just follow a journey where he experiences, from his initial horror and later bafflement, of being in a girl’s world and finding it different in many ways.

It seems as true today as when it was published in 1989 and when I first came across it in the early 1990’s. Anne Fine describes it all in wonderfully vivid language, posing the question why does Rapunzel wait to be rescued instead of making a rope from her own hair and climbing down?

Certainly recommended for tweens and young teens.