This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel

Ridge’s deafness doesn’t impede their relationship or their music. She finds out after the fact that Ridge already has a long-distance girlfriend, Maggie-and that he's deaf. The two begin a songwriting partnership that grows into something more once Sydney dumps Hunter and decides to crash with Ridge and his two roommates while she gets back on her feet. While music student Sydney is watching her neighbor Ridge play guitar on his balcony across the courtyard, Ridge is watching Sydney’s boyfriend, Hunter, secretly make out with her best friend on her balcony. Hoover is a master at writing scenes from dual perspectives. Sydney and Ridge make beautiful music together in a love triangle written by Hoover ( Losing Hope, 2013, etc.), with a link to a digital soundtrack by American Idol contestant Griffin Peterson.

It’s 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.Īs thought-provoking a domestic novel as we have seen this year. 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. But rather than putting Seattle’s tolerance to the test, they keep Poppy’s identity a secret from even her closest friends, a decision that blows up in their faces when she hits puberty. “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. “So, gender dysphoria,” says the bizarrely bouncy therapist. 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. It’s 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. If…you make the wrong call, well, nothing less than your child’s 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 up-a girl. 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 what’s good and right and then to be able to make it happen. A big, brave, messy modern family struggles with the challenges of raising a transgender child.

This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel