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.

Family Life

Fiction

Genre Fiction

Women's Fiction

Heartfelt

Inspiring

Thought-Provoking

Funny

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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)

"Every once in a while, I read a book that opens my eyes in a way I never expected." (Reese Witherspoon, Reese's Book Club x Hello Sunshine book pick)

Most relevant

Amazing book, amazing story .. it shocked me, made me cry and made me laugh.
This story will stay with me for a very long time.