LFP READS - Laurie Frankel - This Is How it Always Is

Shoreline and Richmond Beach Libraries have joined with Lake Forest Park READS again this year, marking the fourteenth year of this community literary event. In This Is How It Always Is, Claude, the youngest of five brothers, is three when he announces that he wants to be a girl. The family agrees that Claude can be Poppy, and grapples with the difficulties and joys of raising a transgender child in this droll, touching novel.

Sponsored by the City of Lake Forest Park's Library Advisory Committee, Friends of the Shoreline, Richmond Beach, and Lake Forest Park Libraries, Friends of Third Place Commons and Third Place Books.

Third Place Books offers 20% off on this title June 1 through July 31.

 

"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 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.

LAURIE FRANKEL is the author of the novels: This Is How It Always Is, The Atlas of Love, and Goodbye for Now. She lives in Seattle with her family.