This Is How It Always Is, by Laurie Frankel (2017)
When Dr. Rosie Walsh is pregnant with her fifth child, she hopes for a girl. Her four other children are all boys. Her fifth child is also a boy, whom they name Claude. By age 3, Claude announces that when he grows up he wants to be a fireman, a truck, a girl. All the things that young children imagine they will be when they grow up. By age 5, however, he is wearing dresses and wants to be a princess.
The family takes Claude’s quirks in stride. Then they realize that Claude is transgender. He decides his name is Poppy. To her older brothers, Poppy is just another sibling. In kindergarten, her classmates just treat him as another kid in the class. All is well until the father of a classmate freaks out and threatens the family.
The family moves from Madison, Wisconsin to Seattle, Washington where they feel the environment will be more welcoming to a transgender child. Once in Seattle, however, Poppy’s birth gender is kept a secret. A secret that the whole family keeps, but one that can’t be hidden forever.
This novel dealt with the issue of raising a transgender child. It provided a lot of research in the trials and tribulations that the family and the child encounter. In this book, the family was loving and accepting, but the author also emphasized problems trans children encounter when their families are not so accepting.
Sadly, for me, this book fell apart in the last section when Poppy and her mother travelled to Thailand where Rosie would temporarily be practice in a remote clinic in the Thai jungle. I understand why the author took us there, but it just didn’t seem in keeping the the tenor of the rest of the novel.
Read: May 25, 2021
4 Stars
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