This is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel
Narrator: Gabra Zackman
Published by Macmillian Audio
Publication Date January 24, 2017
Goodreads
This is how a family keeps a secret…and how that secret ends up keeping them.
This is how a family lives happily ever after…until happily ever after becomes complicated.
This is how children change…and then change the world.
This is Claude. He’s five years old, the youngest of five brothers, and loves peanut butter sandwiches. He also loves wearing a dress, and dreams of being a princess.
When he grows up, Claude says, he wants to be a girl.
Rosie and Penn want Claude to be whoever Claude wants to be. They’re just not sure they’re ready to share that with the world. Soon the entire family is keeping Claude’s secret. Until one day it explodes.
This Is How It Always Is is a novel about revelations, transformations, fairy tales, and family. And it’s about the ways this is how it always is: Change is always hard and miraculous and hard again, parenting is always a leap into the unknown with crossed fingers and full hearts, children grow but not always according to plan. And families with secrets don’t get to keep them forever.
This is How it Is is a very moving book. It explores the family dynamics that change when a loved one is going through the process of transitioning. I loved Poppy’s resilience to become who she truly is despite judgement and liked that it sent the reader on a journey through several years and were able to digest the enormity of Poppy’s decision.
However, midway through the book Claud shaves his head and with that the novel jumped the shark. Claud debates whether he should fully transition or continue to be what society considers normal. To clear his head he goes to Thailand and teaches English as a second language (keep in mind he is only ten). I just felt like the author didn’t know where to go from there and the plot began to unravel.
Overall, I thought it was a good book and really enjoyed the narrator Gabra Zackman but, the novel never sprung back from its diverged road.
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
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