This Is How It Always Is
Laurie Frankel
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
This Is How It Always Is
Laurie Frankel
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Brave, complicated, occasionally horrifying and frequently very funny.
Frankel portrays a family with a trans daughter with dignity and warmth and generosity. In an age where trans bathroom panic leads some Republican men to 'patrol' their local Targets with guns in order to allegedly keep their daughters safe from nonexistent sexual predators, Frankel patiently and calmly tells a story about a very specific experience.
The result is a novel that feels more like a fictionalized account, in ways that are both deeply satisfying and sometimes limiting.
The story is told in close third person, and since the narrator primarily shadows Rosie, Frankel’s sentences mostly reflect Rosie’s personality. They’re practical, calmly but thoroughly analytical, occasionally gritty, occasionally clever. They mostly tell it to you straight—but in moments of power, they swing into a literary register that lets the language do more of the explaining than the explaining does. This strategy makes for easy reading. I blew through the 323 pages in two days.
There is so very much to enjoy in this domestic drama: a carefully tooled narrative that is expansive, perceptive, and gracious; dialogue that is both witty and deep; characters who are remarkably self-actualized. The construct is so beguiling it can annoy at times — would that we mere mortals could be so appealing as we haphazarded our way through life’s booby traps!.