Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by lillimoore
This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel
5.0
This. This has been one of the most rewarding reading experiences of my life so far. This will stick with me every day and never leave me and I could kiss Laurie Frankel I am so grateful for her words and the wisdom in these pages. I can't wait to buy my own copy so I can highlight and underline and annotate and return to these people I love so dearly again and again and again.
Doctor-wife Rosie and author-husband Penn build upon the foundation of their fairy-tale romance a wild brood of 4 boys. Anyone and everyone might call them crazy for trying for one more child in the hopes that it will be a girl, and maybe they ARE crazy—Rosie, after all, is eating certain foods, trying certain positions, and even arranging the furniture in a certain way all in the hopes that it will produce a daughter in the moments leading up to their fifth child's conception. She lost her little sister Poppy to cancer when Poppy was just 10, and dreams of naming her daughter for her lost sister, the other love of her life. But lo and behold, she finds herself with another son, Claude. However, not long into curious and bright Claude's life, he starts questioning everything around him and inside of him, including and especially his gender. Rosie and Penn just want Claude to be happy, but they also want to protect him from the ugliness in the world outside their comfortable home. Eventually, to the dismay of others around the family, Claude becomes Poppy, youngest son becomes only daughter, and the entire family uproots from Madison, Wisconsin to Seattle, Washington in search of a safer and more supportive setting to bring up their children, especially Poppy. We follow Rosie, Penn, and their five children Roo, Ben, Rigel, Orion and Poppy as they adapt to the world they live in created by circumstance.
This book is pitch perfect. The family feels so real, the tension and confrontations with hatred and transphobia deeply painful, the enduring love a saving grace and a generous and healing salve for all the wounds caused. It's a meditation on so many things: parenthood, gender dysphoria, self-acceptance, finding your way in the world, sacrificing one person's happiness and well-being for the safekeeping of another and trusting that everything will work out anyway. I love this family so much. I laughed (particularly every time Penn said, "Don't say ass, Roo," my favorite recurring joke in the novel), I cried—SOBBED—in a way that very rarely happens for me in books, I was wildly angry, I was terrified, I was relieved, I was tentatively hopeful, I felt and became every single emotion with every single member of this family. They have a very, very special place in my heart that will always hold. I will return to this story and the phenomenal writing time and time again.
My only, ONLY qualm with this is not even really one, but the dialogue is so beautiful and so thoughtful that it's ALMOST hard to believe it could really come from real people. Almost. If I didn't have many eloquent speakers in my own personal life, I'm not sure I could believe that the way the characters speak and interact with one another is real in some parts of the book. Again, almost. But this is actually a strong point of the book more than a weak one. It just may bother some readers who dislike that sort of thing in dialogue between characters and find highly intelligent children in fiction to be slightly unbelievable. I don't find this to be true in my own life, but could see where others might.
I took my time with this book in contrast to my usual reading speed. A novel surrounding a family drama takes me at most a week to read, but I usually gobble them up in 2-3 days. I spent two months reading this because I knew I needed to really absorb it. I can’t wait to spend that much time with this rambunctious clan again.
Laurie Frankel is clearly one of the most intelligent writers out there today. She makes me want to write. Her vocabulary and the way she puts thoughts and words together are clearly demonstrative of that. But she's not just intelligent in that way—she also boasts immense emotional intelligence that is suffused into every sentence of this miracle of a book. In the vein of Marisa De Los Santos’ Love Walked In (also a perfect book in my opinion,) Frankel has given us all a gift with this. I am so very forever grateful to her.
Doctor-wife Rosie and author-husband Penn build upon the foundation of their fairy-tale romance a wild brood of 4 boys. Anyone and everyone might call them crazy for trying for one more child in the hopes that it will be a girl, and maybe they ARE crazy—Rosie, after all, is eating certain foods, trying certain positions, and even arranging the furniture in a certain way all in the hopes that it will produce a daughter in the moments leading up to their fifth child's conception. She lost her little sister Poppy to cancer when Poppy was just 10, and dreams of naming her daughter for her lost sister, the other love of her life. But lo and behold, she finds herself with another son, Claude. However, not long into curious and bright Claude's life, he starts questioning everything around him and inside of him, including and especially his gender. Rosie and Penn just want Claude to be happy, but they also want to protect him from the ugliness in the world outside their comfortable home. Eventually, to the dismay of others around the family, Claude becomes Poppy, youngest son becomes only daughter, and the entire family uproots from Madison, Wisconsin to Seattle, Washington in search of a safer and more supportive setting to bring up their children, especially Poppy. We follow Rosie, Penn, and their five children Roo, Ben, Rigel, Orion and Poppy as they adapt to the world they live in created by circumstance.
This book is pitch perfect. The family feels so real, the tension and confrontations with hatred and transphobia deeply painful, the enduring love a saving grace and a generous and healing salve for all the wounds caused. It's a meditation on so many things: parenthood, gender dysphoria, self-acceptance, finding your way in the world, sacrificing one person's happiness and well-being for the safekeeping of another and trusting that everything will work out anyway. I love this family so much. I laughed (particularly every time Penn said, "Don't say ass, Roo," my favorite recurring joke in the novel), I cried—SOBBED—in a way that very rarely happens for me in books, I was wildly angry, I was terrified, I was relieved, I was tentatively hopeful, I felt and became every single emotion with every single member of this family. They have a very, very special place in my heart that will always hold. I will return to this story and the phenomenal writing time and time again.
My only, ONLY qualm with this is not even really one, but the dialogue is so beautiful and so thoughtful that it's ALMOST hard to believe it could really come from real people. Almost. If I didn't have many eloquent speakers in my own personal life, I'm not sure I could believe that the way the characters speak and interact with one another is real in some parts of the book. Again, almost. But this is actually a strong point of the book more than a weak one. It just may bother some readers who dislike that sort of thing in dialogue between characters and find highly intelligent children in fiction to be slightly unbelievable. I don't find this to be true in my own life, but could see where others might.
I took my time with this book in contrast to my usual reading speed. A novel surrounding a family drama takes me at most a week to read, but I usually gobble them up in 2-3 days. I spent two months reading this because I knew I needed to really absorb it. I can’t wait to spend that much time with this rambunctious clan again.
Laurie Frankel is clearly one of the most intelligent writers out there today. She makes me want to write. Her vocabulary and the way she puts thoughts and words together are clearly demonstrative of that. But she's not just intelligent in that way—she also boasts immense emotional intelligence that is suffused into every sentence of this miracle of a book. In the vein of Marisa De Los Santos’ Love Walked In (also a perfect book in my opinion,) Frankel has given us all a gift with this. I am so very forever grateful to her.