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This Is How It Always Is

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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 Inspiring Thought-Provoking Funny

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)

All stars
Most relevant
A wonderful story - brilliantly read. I loved Poppy and her family. I’m hoping there’ll be a follow up book.

I loved this book

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I was moved to tears and laughed out loud. A story that's not only powerful, but about the power of a story. So clever, beautiful and inspiring. I'm so sad to have finished it. I will need a short mourning period before picking up another book.

Beautiful story

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Loved the subject, the family, the humour, the interwoven fairy tale. Expertly performed. Didn't want it to end.

Beautiful, funny, thoughtful, thought-provoking

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Great book, I was sceptical at the start and though it is one of those books which will push the moder outlook on everyone but it is totally the opposite. It helps to understand the story of a main character and opens the mind. The person who reads the book is hard to get use to at the start and sounds a bit dry and read it very fast I had to slow down the speed of it and it helped.

worth a read, moving and modern

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Everything about it was beautiful, story, characters and narration. Loved it so much, I didn't want it to finish.

BEAUTIFUL

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