it is about a woman whose son johnny pretends to be a walrus for fun and who then tries to force johnny to live his life as if he actually were a walrus because people on the internet tell her that she’s a bad person if she doesn’t but who is eventually convinced by a zookeeper that he is a human not an animal and that she should ignore what the internet people say. walsh has said that the book is an allegory for the issue of transgender children.