Review by New York Times Review
one pleasure of being a novelist, I imagine, is playing out scenarios from your own life, but tweaking the characters, or setting, or maybe most satisfying, the ending. Laurie Frankel has a son who, in first grade, decided he was a girl. (She recently wrote a Modern Love column for The Times about it.) Her new novel, "This Is How It Always Is," centers on a young boy who decides he is a girl. The fictional family lives in Seattle, just like the author's real family, and they come more or less from the same social class. You can almost see Frankel flipping through the family albums, looking for inspiration. The result is a novel that feels more like a fictionalized account, in ways that are both deeply satisfying and sometimes limiting. Frankel unfolds the story more or less in chronological order: A couple (Penn and Rosie) date, fall in love, have children (five!), and then the last one (Claude) disrupts the expected order by declaring he is a girl (now Poppy). The parents find themselves on new and scary terrain, trying to balance Poppy's safety and happiness in a world where she might be bullied with her need to be herself. This is an intimate family story, and these day-to-day parenting dilemmas are where Frankel shines. "Please God, Rosie prayed, let him be looking at porn." In fact, Penn is Googling vaginoplasties. The book is full of such unexpected encounters you feel Frankel must have lived through, or heard about: The inquisitive 3-year-old who wonders: "When I grow up and become a girl, will I start over?" The kindergartners who are totally unfazed when Poppy changes her name and starts wearing dresses. The resentful older brother who makes a homophobic school project. The looming apocalypse that is puberty. These moments startle, and yet the book feels a little too close to home, a little too, well, safe. Frankel places Poppy in a thoroughly empathetic and loving family, the kind that picks up and moves to Seattle the minute they encounter a whiff of homophobia in their town. Mom and Dad understand, the principal understands, even Grandma is on board; and waiting in the wings is a wise guru of a therapist. What Poppy is living through is extraordinary, unimaginable, and yet one never feels she will be anything but O.K. The greatest risk Frankel takes with Poppy is having her family keep her real identity a secret. When they move to Seattle, they decide not to tell any of her friends she was born a boy. This provides the book's main tension, as Frankel plants, mystery-style, a handful of possible culprits who will unravel the ever elaborate family deception. The last third of the book is more satisfying for being unpredictable, and dangling the possibility that Poppy is going through something as radical and disruptive, even as dangerous, as it seems. By the end, Poppy has to confront what she's been able to avoid. She and the whole family have to embrace her whole identity, and not just the limited one they invented for the world. Frankel doesn't take us all the way through puberty, but she leaves us understanding that Poppy has a long way to go before she settles. This is when I realized that the title of the book is not a political statement but an ironic one, since nothing is how it always is. ? hanna rosin is a co-host ofthe NPR show "Invisibilia," and the author of "The End of Men: And the Rise of Women."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 1, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
Rosie and Penn Walsh-Adams and their five sons live in a sprawling farmhouse full of chaos, love, and fairy tales. One summer, youngest son Claude begins to wear dresses and bikinis around the house. Rosie and Penn encourage Claude to be himself, and he decides he would be more comfortable as Poppy. While Poppy's brothers and parents accept her, they also all worry about the world she faces. The family deals with fallout from friends and teachers who struggle to understand a nonbinary child. Though their city is generally accepting, Rosie wants to move the family to somewhere they can all feel safe. The family moves to Seattle and soon confronts new challenges. They acknowledge that Poppy is their daughter's true identity, so is there any need to tell her new friends that she used to be Claude? The novel follows family members individually as they struggle with their own secrets and histories. Inspired by her own daughter's transition, Frankel tells Poppy's story with compassion and humor.--Chanoux, Laura Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Frankel's third novel is about the large, rambunctious Walsh-Adams family. While Penn writes his "DN" (damn novel) and spins fractured fairy tales from the family's ramshackle farmhouse in Madison, Wis., Rosie works as an emergency physician. Four sons have made the happily married couple exhausted and wanting a daughter; alas, their fifth is another boy. Extraordinarily verbal little Claude is quirky and clever, traits that run in the family, and at age three says, "I want to be a girl." Claude is the focus, but Frankel captures the older brothers' boyish grossness. She also fleshes out his two eldest brothers, who worry about Claude's safety when Rosie and Penn agree that Claude can be Poppy at school. But coming out further isolates this unique child. Encouragement from a therapist and an accepting grandma can go just so far; Poppy only blossoms after the Walsh-Adamses move to progressive Seattle and keep her trans status private, although what is good for Poppy is increasingly difficult on her brothers. The story takes a darker turn when she is outed; Rosie and her youngest must find their footing while Penn stays at home with the other kids. Frankel's (The Atlas of Love) slightly askew voice, exemplified by Rosie and Penn's nontraditional gender roles, keeps the narrative sharp and surprising. This is a wonderfully contradictory story-heartwarming and generous, yet written with a wry sensibility. Agent: Molly Friedrich, Friedrich Literary Agency. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Frankel's third novel is her most personal: as the mother of a transgender daughter, she writes what she knows with clarity, truth, and heart. Rosie and Penn already have four sons when Claude arrives. A remarkable child by all accounts, by age three, Claude announces he wants to be a girl when he grows up. Cautious at first, the family creates a loving, nurturing world as Claude becomes Poppy. After Rosie treats a horrifically battered young trans woman in the ER one night, her fear for Poppy's future results in uprooting the family from Wisconsin to liberal Seattle. But even in the most accepting environments, living with secrets has challenges and consequences impossible to ignore. Narrator Gabra Zackman superbly endows each family member with distinctive personalities, but her characterization of Poppy-her curiosity, joy, devastation, resolve-is especially affecting. Zackman is also memorable as Poppy's unwaveringly supportive, no-nonsense grandmother and as "therapist-magician" Mr. Tonga, who proves to be the family's best cheerleader and realist both. VERDICT With transgender rights making regular headlines, all libraries would do well to enable Frankel's latest to show listeners how it always is-and should be-in families and communities everywhere. ["A touching and sympathetic account that is brimming with life and hard to put down": LJ 1/17 review of the Flatiron: Macmillan hc.]-Terry Hong, Smithsonian -BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by School Library Journal Review
When Claude, who has always resisted stereotypical male behaviors, wants to wear dresses to kindergarten, Rosie and Penn help their young child deal with classmates, parents, teachers, and administrators who don't understand why Claude, who now identifies as female, wants to be called Poppy. After an incident with another parent almost turns violent, the family of seven pick up and move from Madison, WI, to Seattle. Poppy's history remains a secret-until she's in fifth grade. Penn, an aspiring writer and stay-at-home dad, also experiences a journey of self-discovery as he develops his talent for storytelling. Though the third-person perspective revolves mostly around the parents, it will still resonate with teens. Many readers will identify with Poppy, while others will gain fresh perspective on gender identity. -VERDICT This thought-provoking, accessible work would make an excellent parent/teen book club choice.-Carrie Shaurette, Dwight-Englewood School, Englewood, NJ © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A big, brave, messy modern family struggles with the challenges of raising a transgender child. This is how it always is. You have to make these huge decisions on behalf of your kid, this tiny human whose fate and future is entirely in your hands, who trusts you to know whats good and right and then to be able to make it happen. Ifyou make the wrong call, well, nothing less than your childs entire future and happiness is at stake. Claude Walsh-Adams is all of 3 years old when he announces what he wants to be when he grows upa girl. Its a particularly tricky case of be careful what you wish for for his doctor mom and novelist dad, already the parents of four boys when they roll the reproductive dice one last time. At home, barrettes and dresses are fine, but once he starts kindergarten as a boy, Claude becomes so miserable that, with the advice of a multi-degree-social-working-therapist-magician, his parents decide to let him become Poppy. So, gender dysphoria, says the bizarrely bouncy therapist. Congratulations to you both! Mazel tov! How exciting! The excitement takes a nasty turn when horrifying homophobic incidents convince Rosie that the family must leave Madison, Wisconsin, for the reputedly more enlightened Seattle, Washington. But rather than putting Seattles tolerance to the test, they keep Poppys identity a secret from even her closest friends, a decision that blows up in their faces when she hits puberty. Though well-plotted, well-researched, and unflaggingly interesting, the novel is cloying at times, with arch formulations, preachy pronouncements, and a running metafictional fairy tale. Its worth putting up with the occasional too-much-ism for all the rest of what bright, brave author Frankel (Goodbye for Now, 2012) has to offer as the mother of a transgender second-grader in real life. As thought-provoking a domestic novel as we have seen this year. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
