Roger Sutton, Editor in Chief of THE HORN BOOK MAGAZINE, wrote: “…You can’t tell the gender of the child created by Tomie dePaola - himself one of children’s literature’s most felicitous philosophers of what it means to be a boy or a girl - for our cover, and that’s on purpose. Reading allows us to independently and privately assume whatever (not whichever) gender we like, to see how it looks from a different side. Remember the old man in Mordicai Gerstein’s THE MOUNTAINS OF TIBET? When allowed to decide what kind of life he wanted for his next incarnation, he chose the one he just had - with only the revision of his gender, a difference at once small and profound…” (Bob)
