Annabel

Kathleen Winter’s luminous debut novel is a deeply affecting portrait of life in an enchanting seaside town and the trials of growing up unique in a restrictive environment. 

In 1968, into the devastating, spare atmosphere of the remote coastal town of Labrador, Canada, a child is born: a baby who appears to be neither fully boy nor fully girl, but both at once. Only three people are privy to the secret: the baby’s parents, Jacinta and Treadway, and a trusted neighbor and midwife, Thomasina. Though Treadway makes the difficult decision to raise the child as a boy named Wayne, the women continue to quietly nurture the boy’s female side. And as Wayne grows into adulthood within the hyper-masculine hunting society of his father, his shadow-self, a girl he thinks of as "Annabel," is never entirely extinguished.

Kathleen Winter has crafted a literary gem about the urge to unveil mysterious truth in a culture that shuns contradiction, and the body’s insistence on coming home. A daringly unusual debut full of unforgettable beauty, Annabel introduces a remarkable new voice to American readers. 


This book made me realize something about myself that I had never thought about before. Apparently, I have very strong opinions about how to raise a child that is not specifically male or female. I have never met a child or adult (that I know of) that is or has been considered Intersexed (from my research, I have discovered that this the politically correct term for Human Hermaphroditism), but I became particularly emotional when Wayne's parents made decisions about how to raise him that I felt were constrictive before they even knew who he would grow up to be. I needed to remind myself that in this book Wayne was born in the 60s and things were quite different back then, but that didn't stop me from thinking about how I would do things differently, and what I would feel would be far less damaging to a child's self image and esteem. 

I was also very aware of how people place far too much concern on gender. After going through everything I have with my youngest, I understand how advantageous it can be to have surgeries as young as possible, but one that is so determinant of self image and gender identity seems reckless. How can you choose a sex for a child before having them develop a personality, realize their tendencies, and possibly include their wishes? I get the feeling from this novel that perhaps people were more invested in the idea of nurture over nature at the time, and figured that as long as you raise your child in such a way that encourages a certain sex, then your child will become more gender identified with it (Could you imagine if it was that easy?: You want your child to be a doctor? Buy your child doctor toys and they will be a doctor!! Horray!). However, now we have a greater understanding of what creates a person's identity and it is far more a combination of the two than it is either nurture or nature.

There was a line that really hit home for me early in the book, just shortly after Wayne was born: His mom says: "when you are a mother, you take it all in stride. You take albino hair in stride, when you are a mother. When you are the mother, not someone watching that mother, you take odd coloured eyes in stride. You take a missing hand in stride and the same with Down Syndrome, and spina bifida, and water on the brain. You would take wings in stride, or one lung outside the body, or a missing tongue." This is exactly how I felt about Dominic's diagnosis and I feel is a great depiction of parenthood. People always said how they didn't understand how I could handle everything so well when Dominic was diagnosed with everything he was diagnosed with. As a mom, you just take it all in stride. It can always be worse, until it can't, and that is when you break. Until that point, it's just another fact about your child. It doesn't change how you love them, it just makes you more aware of their struggles.

Also, this book made me want to hug and snuggle all the babies. Especially ones that have a rough start or a tough situation. As soon as the baby was born (before baby was even named) I just felt this huge urge to cuddle this baby that wasn't considered "normal", to whisper to this baby that everything will be fine and people will send love regardless of the gender that was chosen. That things would be tough, but s/he wasn't all that different, not a "freak" if anyone dared to call him/her that. S/he was just a baby, and someone to be loved and cuddled like everyone else. Perhaps I think love and cuddles will make everything alright, but so far it seems to have worked for Dominic ;)

This really was a good book, but still wasn't a five-star rating in my opinion. The biggest fault it had was some errors in facts about true intersexed individuals. Through some fact checking I came to realize one particular aspect of the story would technically make this a science fiction novel. I won't get into specifics about it due to spoilers, but know that not all the information presented about intesexed people is likely, or even at all possible. It gave me a lot to think about, which is something I really value in a novel. It did have a few parts in it that seemed to slow down the pace and lose my attention for a bit though. It was good, it just wasn't perfect.