A metaphor that doesn’t quite land.
Lili is a child who feels out of place all the time. “She was like a tiger, and everyone else, a duck.” She wonders if her family would still like her if they find out, and asks, “Had she been born all wrong?” The images show Lili with a large purple tiger, a manifestation of her feelings of difference. Other people have ducks flying around them.
She tries hard to be a duck, tying a duck hat onto the purple tiger and changing her own clothes from jeans to a skirt and her hair from two puffs to a bun. She still feels terrible.
Finally, she pushes through her fright and tells her Gran, who assures Lili that she’ll still love her just the same. “Not everyone is a duck,” Gran says, “and not all ducks flock together.” Be true to yourself and show the real you, she advises, even if it’s hard, because “one day you’ll find your pride!” The final scene shows her with a group of children, smiling and happy, and a variety of animals around them, with a rainbow overhead.
Some rainbow iconography towards the end and the final “pride” imply that the book is about queer identity, although this might have been better established up front. The use of she/her for Lili throughout further implies that Lili’s queerness is not around gender identity, but her desire to wear jeans and not a skirt indicates that she may be gender creative. Whether she is also lesbian or bi is an open question. I think it’s fine not to slap a label on her, but I would also argue that a simple desire to wear jeans (perfectly acceptable clothing for girls today) and not a skirt does not a queer kid make. I think the author intends more than that (I’m guessing lesbian or bi identity), but the metaphor obscures what she really does mean. Young readers may not understand exactly what it is about Lili that makes her feel “born all wrong.”
Newbery honoree and Stonewall Award winner Kyle Lukoff has written an excellent piece about the limits of metaphors (including animal analogies) to describe gender identity. I’d argue that much the same is true for other queer identities as well—and that this book is a good example of what Lukoff describes as “asking … marginalized children to do the work of parsing clumsy metaphor to see themselves.” (I have no idea what Lukoff actually thinks of Duck, Duck, Tiger, however, and if I have misused his thoughts about metaphor, the error is mine.)
I am also always hesitant about books that begin with queerness seen as a “problem,” even if that problem is later resolved. For children who have felt the isolation of being different, such books might provide some needed comfort—but again, as Lukoff has argued about trans representation in children’s books, “Instead of having to parse themselves solely through tortured metaphors … [trans children] should also be given the descriptors that line up with how other trans people talk about themselves and, more importantly, the communities and cultures that we build and maintain by ourselves, for ourselves and each other.”
The rhyming text also sometimes feels a bit forced. Nevertheless, the message of being oneself is well-intentioned, and I appreciate that.
Lili and her family are Black; other people in the book are a variety of racial/ethnic identities.
