Coleen was born with a question in her mouth. She wondered whether her dog Thumper could laugh. She wondered why zebras weren’t plaid, and whether porpoises could play the piano if only they had hands. She wondered too why some people lived in shacks and other people lived in grand houses and what the polar bears will do if the polar ice melts. Her parents worried that Coleen asked too many questions. But one day, question asking began to spread all over town, and very surprising things began to happen.

Coleen was first published by the Feminist Press in l974 when Arlie Hochschild, sociologist and author, was the mother of a three year old. In 2016 it was rewritten, newly illustrated by Rhiannon Williams and republished by Invisible Spaces of Parenthood.