This is How it Always is by Laurie Frankel

Published: December 2018
Genres: Literary Fiction, Woman's Fiction

👑👑👑👑


Description:

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.

Laurie Frankel's 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.

Review:

This was my Bookclub's pick for September. This one definitely gave me all the feels. If you have not read this one I highly recommend dropping whatever you are doing and getting right on it! I was a bit skeptical about reading a book that encouraged a child at 5years of age to make a HUGE life changing desicion and switch genders. As a mom and daycare provider, I know 3 and 4 year olds have a hard time remembering the difference if they or their friend is a boy or a girl. As a 5 year old I don't find the mental development that much further.

With that said, I feel like there was a lot of the book that came about "to easily". The parents for one. They seemed to always "have the right answers" knew exactly how to navigate this journey without any questioning of themselves or each other. I have no idea what I would do in their shoes but I found their journey through this a little to story book like. As a parent who is trying to figure out how to navigate this new world and teach my children to do the same, it would have been a lot more relatable had the parents' struggle been more believable. I think the author should have stepped back and separated her situation a bit more from how she wants people to react to how they really will react.

Furthermore, regarding the parents, they really just bugged the crap out of me. As a working adult she couldn't get her butt to work on time, no adult is going to get away from that. The dad was supposed to be a writer but let's take 10 years to figure out what we're going to write about. Insert large eye rolling. Claude/Poppy, I did feel for the child. The laughs and tears all came at the right spot. I completely fell in love with this child and wanted to protect him/her.

Overall I did enjoy the book. It was something way outside the circle of things that I have read and really shed the light about how I would react and handle this situation.