Five Star Friday - This Is How It Always Is

 This week's Five Star read was read by Jay!

Amazon

Synopsis from Goodreads: 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.

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.

"This is a novel everyone should read. It’s brilliant. It’s bold. And it’s time.”
―Elizabeth George, #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Banquet of Consequences

Genre? Contemporary Fiction/LGBT+

Backlist? Yes. Published January 4, 2017.

New to me Author? Yes.

Why I rated it 5 stars? 

This is easily going to become one of those books that I recommend to EVERYONE who asks me for recs. It was so well written and I was so invested.

The whole storyline with Claude/Poppy is just so relevant right now. This novel leads to great conversations about LGBT/Trans without being political at all, which is a bit unusual. It really had me thinking about what I would do if my son came to me and said he wanted to be a girl. Would I handle it with as much grace as Rosie and Penn did? I would like to hope so. 

This story is told throughout Claude/Poppy's life from about five years old through fifth grade. It shows the struggles, the triumphs, and how a family moves forward.