A review by baancs
This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel

emotional reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

“maybe she—and you and I—need to learn to live in a world that refuses to accept a person with a beard who goes by ‘she’ and wears a skirt and be happy anyway.”

“How?”

“How what?”

“How do we learn to live in that world and be happy anyway?”

About how a family, protecting their trans kid, is owned by their secret. It’s about acceptance, but also about the ways society tells us it’s wrong for a boy to wear dresses just like it’s wrong for a girl to be in sports. It’s maddening, frustrating, and sad.