Book Review: This is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel

This is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Release Date: January 24, 2017
My rating: 4.5 of 5 stars

Publisher’s 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.

I remember a lot of buzz around the blogosphere when this book was first published but I never got around to reading it. I also remember loving Frankel’s book Goodbye for Now. I just joined a new-to-me book club and I was excited that they were reading this book for my first month as a member.

This is How It Always Is is the story of Claude, a boy who dreams of being a girl when he grows up. Rosie and her husband Penn allow Claude to live as Poppy but choose to keep the fact that she was born a boy a secret from the outside world. Poppy has four older brothers who each deal with the stress of having to keep their sister’s secret differently.

Even though Rosie and Penn are accepting of Poppy, they make their fair share of mistakes parenting her. And they don’t agree on everything, like what will happen as Poppy nears puberty – will she start puberty blockers or not? Frankel tempers what is a very serious situation for a child with plenty of humor. The social worker who councils Rosie and Penn is so funny that I didn’t mind that he’s probably not a realistic character.

This book is a good book club selection, especially for a book club comprised of parents. In the Author’s Note, Frankel writes that she herself is the parent of a transgender child but that the book is not her daughter’s story. However, knowing that she has a transgender daughter makes me think that most of what Poppy and her family think and feel is authentic.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Highly recommended.