This Is How It Always Is: A Novel
New York Times Bestseller
The Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine Book Club Pick
People Magazine’s Top 10 Books of the year
The Globe and Mail's Top 100 Books of the year
“It made me laugh, it made me cry, it made me think.”
—Liane Moriarty, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Big Little Lies
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 in which 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.
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Community Reviews
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✨ Summarized by Bookclubs AI
Readers say *This Is How It Always Is* is a deeply moving, tender family story that explores love, acceptance, and parenting through the lens of a tra...
This story is a deeply moving novel about a family navigating the journey of raising a transgender child. The story follows Claude, who has always known she is a girl and renames herself Poppy after her mother's late sister.
The book brilliantly captures the tension of protecting a child from outside cruelty and misunderstanding while fostering a safe space for self-expression at home. Especially touching are the imaginative bedtime stories Poppy’s father, Penn, uses to help her make sense of the world. As a parent, it is easy to connect with the universal fears of navigating unfamiliar territory and the constant worry of making mistakes while trying to do right by your child.
Ultimately, this is a tender, thought-provoking story about the fear of the unknown, self-discovery, and the profound strength of a family learning to support one another.
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