Review: This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel

This is How it Always Is by Laurie Frankel

Published: January 24, 2017

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Format: via Audible

Rating: 5/5

Synopsis

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.

My Thoughts

I've had this audiobook for over a year until one day I was scanning my Audible and decided to listen. Wow! This book is simply amazing and it touched my soul like no other. In This Is How It Always Is we start off with a couple and we get to know their courtship, marriage and then their kids. We soon learn that they are expecting again and once again it’s a boy… and then Claude is born.

Claude is a loving child who soon shows us he likes to play with dolls and likes to dress up but as time goes by it becomes more. It isn’t a phase to Claude he wants to be girl…deep down he knows he is a girl. Even at a very young age, he knows who he is and more importantly who he isn’t.

We see Claude as he goes to school and after they move so Claude who has changed his name can start his life as who he was meant to be and make friends who only know him as a girl. He is living the life he wants all while his family keeps his secret. In time the secret is out and their lives begin to unravel, we see how this has affected everyone in the family and the toll it takes on Claude. He decides to go back to Claude as to not hurt anyone but it's clear he’s only hurting his true self not to mention he isn’t Claude anyone, more like he was never meant to be Claude.

This is a heartbreaking novel of a person who from the start knows who he was meant to be. I was literally in tears when he cuts his hair and starts to dress “like a boy” so that he wouldn’t hurt his family anymore but its clear at that point that he wasn’t Claude anymore. What I also found interesting were the parents. Penn was a stay at home dad and Rosie was a doctor. We usually hear about the mother always being the more understanding one and the father is the one who doesn’t want to come to terms with things but in the story, it was the opposite. Penn wanted their child to be who they wanted regardless of what others thought and Rosie was scared maybe or by being a doctor wanted to think about all the options.  This was a beautifully written novel that gives us an insight into the lives of transgender children and their families. It shows us how parents have the difficult decisions on what to do and when to listen to their children's pleas on who they really are. I personally loved this novel and loved how it focused on a younger child than we usually read about. If you're looking for a book based on love, understanding and family pick this one up it's definitely worth the read.