This Is How It Always Is

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 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. 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.