Blog

This is the official description of the book:

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.

I put this description on here because it is one of the few that gives a true picture of what this book is about. What do you do as parents when your 5 year old tells you that he is a girl? This comes after Rosie and Penn have had 4 boys and tried for a 5th girl in hopes that it will be a girl this time. Rosie secretly hoping for a girl to name Poppy – the name of her sister who she lost as a child.

At first Rosie and Penn think it is a phase and treats it as such, but as the years go by they come to see that it is real and the dilemma and issues they face as parents are basically the foundation of this book. 

It’s easy to think this book is simply about a transgender child but I think it covers a multitude of things. I liked how Frankel makes you question what it is to be a parent. When you become a parent do you really consider ALL the possibilities that it comes with and are you equipped to handle it?

With Claude wanting to be a girl, there are 4 other kids to consider but inevitably, a lot of attention is given to Claude and the other kids have to suffer with less attention and also keep this secret within the family, which is a lot to ask of kids. Also, having to deal with a spouse who has different ideas of dealing with things. What is your boundary as a parent considering your kid is still young and needs guidance? How do you know if you are stifling or guiding?

This book is different in that in this case, Claude has supportive parents who are willing to go through far lengths to help with his transition, which usually isn’t the case. Some may consider it unrealistic but I think some people, albeit not the norm, do hit the jackpot with supportive family. I do think, Frankel was balanced in that I didn’t get the sense she was saying this is the best way to handle a situation like this. You could very clearly see that Rosie and Penn were just doing the best they can or rather what they thought was best.

75% into the story, the location shifts to Thailand and for me that is when the book lost the plot for me and kinda went into boring mode. It just didn’t gel with the first part of the story. 

Overall, it was a good read and I think it is a good entry point for anyone who is wary of LGBT topics because the truth about it is as a parent, what do you do if this happens to you? There is a difference between keeping your kid safe at home but there is a whole world out there that is not as friendly and you have to account for that. I found a point in the book interesting when a character said when a girl wants to only wear pants and kick a ball, no one bats an eyelid and she is called a tom boy but when a boy wants to play with dolls and wear skirts everyone is in a panic.

Laurie Frankel is the mother of a transgender child but insists that this book is not autobiographical as everyone will deal with this differently. I’ll leave you with this quote from Frankel’s acknowledgements (yes, I read those):

“For my child, for all our children, I want more options, more paths through the woods, wider ranges of normal, and unconditional love. Who doesn’t want that? I know this book will be controversial, but honestly? I keep forgetting why”

We’d love more interaction from you guys, so please feel free to let us know what you think. Do you think you will read this? How do you think you will react as a parent if your kid came up to you as a 5 year old insisting they were the opposite gender of what they are? Drop a comment!

Follow us on twitter at @2nightstands and on instagram at @nightstands2

“The first sound we want our children to hear is the voice of their father, telling the child where it has come from, who its creator is, and whose care it will be in now. Telling the child, there is no God but God, and God is Great.” 

The Place For Us is about an Indian-American Muslim family in their small town in California. We are introduced to them on the wedding day of the oldest daughter and are informed that they are all together and complete, for the first time in three years. It is from here that the family has to confront the past and contend with all the decisions and choices made that has led them to this point. The parents, Rafiq and Layla, have to go through the reckoning of  trying to raise their kids the best way they could. Passing on the traditions, culture and religion that they know, to children who were born on foreign soil and with the burden of straddling two worlds at the same time.

“We pray together and when it is time for us to ask for what our hearts desire, my first wish is that he remain steadfast in faith, and then if he does not, that he never believe that God is a being with a heart like a human’s, capable of being small and vindictive.”

The book provides many beautiful moments. We read scenes from this family’s life over a span of decades. We watch them grow, make mistakes and watch the parents, parent the best they know how. It is written from every family member’s point of view. Through out the novel we get each version of events via everybody’s eyes except the dad’s, which comes at the very end of the book. There are no chapter markers or heads up about whose POV is coming up but I never felt lost or confused.

I felt like I got an honest glimpse into an unfamiliar culture, and the similarities between every culture, faith and the stories we tell ourselves and the concept of family kept me sitting at the table listening to their stories. I think what Mirza does best is the ability to create a story that uniquely belongs to this family but we as outsiders can recognize our own families in them even if we are none of the markers that the family identifies as.

Mirza creates complete and complex characters who are not stereotypes or caricatures of themselves. The siblings who are at the forefront of this novel – Amir, Huda and Hadia – are so beautifully crafted and recognizable that you root for them to make the right decisions. We see how this family is forced to deal with the repercussions of 9/11, the overt and open racism and Islamophobia that it gave rise to – there is a stunning scene where the father makes his two girls take off their hijab to protect them from the backlash they are likely to face in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks.

“But I did fight. I tried to leave every human I have interacted with better than or the same as when I encountered them….It was the way I wanted to move through the world….That was my fight: to continue to do little things for people around me, so no one would find fault in my demeanor and misattribute it to my religion.” 

I love the closing section of this book which is the only one from the father’s POV, because it puts things into perfect clarity. Even though, I loved the ending, I do not think a lot of people will because everything is not resolved with a big bow, in fact we are left with a lot of questions unanswered – even I wanted to know more about Amir’s life and his choices.

I utterly enjoyed this book, I love complex family stories and slow burns as long as it’s written really well which I believe this book was. If you’re one for a lot of action, i’m not sure this is the one for you. I gave this book five stars on good reads.

Have you read this book? What did you think? Do you think you’d pick it up now after this review? Let me know in the comments!

Leggy

“Sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground, and start over. After the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow. People are like that, too. They start over. They find a way” 

It has been a minute since I started this book. I checked it out from my library months ago and it expired before I got to finish it. I had to go back on a wait list to get it and after I got it back it took me some time to get back into it. 2 days before it was going to expire again, I decided to just go for it (also helped that I listened to a podcast where someone was completely raving about the book) and I finally got through with it.

Little Fires Everywhere is a novel by Asian-American author, Celeste Ng. It’s about two families – The wealthy Richardson family that consists of 4 kids – Tripp, Lexie, Moody and Izzy and the mother-daughter duo of Mia and Pearl. Mia and Pearl have been on the move for so long that Pearl is used to it. But she is 15 now and Mia promises that their stop in Shaker Heights, OH (the real hometown of the author) will be more permanent and it is probably time to settle down.

Mia is renting a flat from Mrs. Richardson and Pearl and Moody become best friends and is always at the Richardson’s house. Mia is an artist but does odd jobs to stay afloat and being a cleaner and cook for the Richardson’s become two of her jobs. While Pearl is always at the Richardson’s house, the youngest Richardson, Izzie is always with Mia. She feels more at home with Mia than with her family especially her mom Elena, who does not understand her and is not always kind to her.

We get to know the family and then we are hit with the main story line in which the Richardsons family friend try to adopt an Asian-American baby and get into a custody battle that divides the families and the whole town. This division leads Elena to delve into Mia’s past and the action trickles down into a myriad of events that culminate into little fires everywhere (you see what I did there?)

You guyssss, my book slump might be over! I didn’t know what to expect (as always, I did not know what the book was about). I liked Ng’s other novel “Everything I Never Told You” enough but it wasn’t great or anything so my expectations weren’t high.

This book was so beautifully written, I felt like I could feel all the love and care Ng put into each and every character. You completely felt that you knew what each character was about and who they were. I found Elena very selfish and unlikable and I guess that was her role to play as the villain but even then, she still felt very real. She was the embodiment of certain type of people in America who live and die by “morals”

Many topics were addressed that made it so real:

Racism – “Everyone sees race, Lex,” said Moody. “The only difference is who pretends not to.” 

Nature vs. Nurture – “It came, over and over, down to this: What made someone a mother? Was it biology alone, or was it love?” 

Life philosophies – “One had followed the rules, and one had not. But the problem with rules… was that they implied a right way and a wrong way to do things. When, in fact, most of the time they were simply ways, none of them quite wrong or quite right, and nothing to tell you for sure what side of the line you stood on.” 

Parenthood – “To a parent, your child wasn’t just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all at the same time. You could see it every time you looked at her: layered in her face was the baby she’d been and the child she’d become and the adult she would grow up to be, and you saw them all simultaneously, like a 3-D image. It made your head spin. It was a place you could take refuge, if you knew how to get in. And each time you left it, each time your child passed out of your sight, you feared you might never be able to return to that place again.”

I could go on forever. But besides being humane, this was an intelligent book. While I was invested in the characters, it also made me think, made me examine where I stood on certain topics and as I type this, I still don’t know where I lie on the custody battle. The first chapter seems pretty unremarkable but by the last two chapters, it made more sense and I returned to read it before going back to finish the book.

The only thing I’d say I didn’t like was, the end. I’ve said before how endings must be really difficult to write because very rarely do I find endings I am satisfied with. I still don’t know how a certain event in the book happened and things were left vague. I was so tense reading the book just wondering how this will unfold that when I didn’t get a nice little bow, I was a little let down.

Just in case you couldn’t tell by everything I have said above, I completely enjoyed this book and totally recommend it.

P.S If you’d like to purchase the book it is $2.99 here

Taynement

“Our family rejected materialism and popular culture and yet we also produced it. The show…paid for the SUVs Mother and Daddy drove, the lake house, the ‘spiritual retreat’ that was actually a villa in Saint John. It paid for the car seat I rode home in from the hospital, the muslin blankets I was swaddled in when I slept. It paid for my first backpack when it came time for me to go to school, Mother having by then completely abandoned giving lessons in the living room, not just because her time and energy were better spent promoting our brand but also because marketing said that what our audience wanted at that point was a character who was ‘normal.'”

17 year old Essie has grown up in front of the camera as the youngest member of a reality TV show family called Six for Hicks (think the Duggars). Her father is a famous televangelist and has built up a congregation and an audience by saying controversial things and parading his family around for America as the perfect example of what a family should be. There’s a problem though, from the first page we are informed that 17 year old Essie is pregnant and her mother scrambles to find a way to make the problem go away and decides to find her a husband.

The Book Of Essie is a very engrossing and riveting story that is quite difficult to put down. I read this book in one seating, and it is the perfect summer read. This book tackles some pretty heavy topics but it doesn’t really go into anyone of them in detail so no trigger warning needed here.

Though it was pretty predictable (once you read the first 50 pages you can tell what’s coming), it still had my attention and intrigued me enough to want to know what happened next. That did not dampen my enjoyment of it at all, I just read on to discover if my suspicions were right. The book is told through the voices of Essie, her friend Roarke and a journalist called Liberty with her own childhood traumas as well.

On the other hand, this is a debut book and it shows. The author tries to pack way too many plots that end up not being fleshed out. Essie picks Liberty to be the journalist who interviews her for her wedding storyline on the show because of her background. I honestly felt this could have been left out because it was so rushed and didn’t really add anything much to the plot except to explain why Essie picked her.

The writing could have been better, the characters come off as stereotypes instead of real life people. For a book containing some objectively disturbing content, it never moved me because the author just tells us things instead of showing it to us, like a newscaster giving you the facts. The characters never feel real so you don’t root for anybody because you can literally see the author pulling the strings.

If you’re fascinated by reality tv shows you’d love this book. I think there is a potential here and I’ll be looking out for this author in the future. I gave this book 3 stars on Goodreads and would recommend this because it is a fun and fast book to get through.

Have you read this one? Did you like it? Let us know what you think in the comments!