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This Is How It Always Is

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This Is How It Always Is

By: Laurie Frankel
Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
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About this listen

The Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine Book Club Pick.

A New York Times Audio best seller.

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.

©2017 Laurie Frankel (P)2017 Macmillan Audio Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Women's Fiction Heartfelt

Critic Reviews

"A lively and fascinating story of a thoroughly modern family and the giant, multifaceted love that binds them... Sparkles with wit and wisdom." (Maria Semple, best-selling author of Where'd You Go, Bernadette)
"An intelligent, life-affirming, emotionally charged story." ( Prima)
All stars
Most relevant  
Loved it. Sensitively handled and developed. The story had me engaged, inspired, amused and emotional.

Beautifully written and performed

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Beautifully written and performed, I enjoyed every moment of this story. The cadence of the writing, the characters, the flow of it and how invested in even some of the minor characters I became made me feel part of the story; indeed, their family!

Loved it!

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i really enjoyed the two simultaneous stories of 'real life', and the fairytale that their dad created. the book was very good, i just wished that the author could have explored non-binary identity as well as trans identity.

nice to have some good trans representation

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This is a beautiful book, perfectly read. It’s tender and raw and I’m not yet tired of listening to it even though I’ve listened to it every night for over a year. Highly recommend!

I think I’ve played this 25 times

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best book in ages loved it five star plus. will look for this author again

loved it five star plus

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So much love for this book!!
I felt so invested in this story, the performance was perfection! I would love to read a sequel please!!

Wow just wow!

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LOVED this book! I did not want it to end, it made me laugh and cry and wonder. Beautifully written and the narration was superb. Highly recommend!!

LOVED it!!

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I didn't know if I would like this book or not. It sounded interesting and something that I had never read about before. Some of the reviews on Goodreads tempered my enthusiasm by saying that it was a little syrupy, but that just meant that I wanted to check it out for myself. I recommend that others do this too. It is worth reading. It was well narrated too.

Hard to put stars on.

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This book will be hard to knock off the top of 2020 list. I laughed, I ugly cried, I felt and I learned. Amazing.

Best book read in 2020 so far

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I just loved this book. It made me laugh, it made me cry and overall just made me feel happy.

Heartwarming

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