Lily and Dunkin

Overview

Donna Gephart's Lily and Dunkin follows two eighth graders navigating identity in a Florida middle school. Lily Jo McGrother knows she is a girl, though the world around her still sees the boy she was named at birth, Timothy. Keeping that truth hidden from classmates, and even from her own father, becomes harder by the day.

Norbert Dorfman, who goes by Dunkin, has just relocated from New Jersey and is adjusting to a new town while managing bipolar disorder. He carries a private grief connected to his old life that he isn't ready to share with anyone. When he and Lily meet, an unlikely friendship forms that neither of them expects.

Told from alternating points of view, the novel traces how each character's hidden struggle shapes the choices they make and the risks they're willing to take to be known honestly by the people around them.

A Story of Parallel Struggles

Gephart builds the novel around a structural choice: pairing a transgender character with a character managing mental illness so that neither experience is treated as singular or exotic. Both Lily and Dunkin are contending with parts of themselves that feel unsafe to reveal, and both are surrounded by adults and peers who react with a mixture of support, confusion, and cruelty. The book has drawn comparisons to other middle-grade stories about visible difference and empathy, and it has been recognized on multiple year-end and notable-books lists aimed at young readers.

What distinguishes the novel within that tradition is its refusal to resolve either character's arc with a tidy fix. Lily's transition is presented as an ongoing, sometimes painful process involving her family, her school, and her own uncertainty, while Dunkin's bipolar disorder is treated as a chronic condition requiring medication and support rather than a phase to outgrow. The pairing invites young readers to see both experiences as part of a broader, shared question about what it costs to hide who you are.

Why Lily and Dunkin Has Been Challenged

Objections to Lily and Dunkin center almost entirely on its portrayal of a transgender protagonist. Challengers have argued that the book introduces gender identity concepts to middle-grade readers in ways they consider inappropriate for the age group, or that it promotes a viewpoint on gender that conflicts with their own beliefs. Some complaints have grouped the novel with other titles featuring LGBTQ+ characters as part of broader efforts to remove such books from school libraries and classrooms.

A smaller thread of criticism has focused on the book's treatment of mental illness, though this has been far less prominent than the concerns raised about Lily's storyline. Within the scope of this catalog, the novel has been challenged or banned in 6 states and 15 districts, reflecting how contested its subject matter has been in school and library settings even as the book continues to appear on recommended reading lists for its handling of empathy and difference.