This is How it Always Is - Laurie Frankel

After reading a couple memoirs in a row that included some exceptionally dangerous parenting, it was kind of a relief to step into This is How it Always Is with Rosie and Penn and their brood of five boys. Rosie and Penn are very different, but their marriage together works somehow. Rosie is a trauma doctor and Penn a struggling writer. Their first four boys, Roo, Ben, Orion and Rigel prepare them for their fifth son, Claude, or so they think. At age three, Claude requests to wear a dress and then clearly begins preferring traditionally girl clothes and accessories. 

Penn and Rosie, being progressive parents, indulge their child and then realize that it's possible their child is more than just interested in dressing like a girl. This leads to a probably diagnosis of gender dysphoria. And Claude officially transitions to Poppy in his kindergarten class to some general confusion but otherwise everything is going okay until Rosie treats a transgender woman who has been badly beaten at the University of Wisconsin campus. Rosie decides Wisconsin is just not the place to raise a transgender child.

The whole family moves to Seattle to try to create a better life for Poppy, but they get some things wrong, as parents are apt to do. And the whole family begins to suffer under the strain of keeping Poppy's secret. Even though they know this is a bad way to go, the secret seems to grow until there is no good way out from under it. Then some other stuff happens but I don't want to ruin all that, although Frankel's style of writing often gives you facts from the future when explaining a certain situation.

Each one of the boys in this story could probably support his own book, along with their sister, but since this story is about their sister, they take somewhat of a back seat. There's only so much one author can do within the confines of a novel.

Anyway, I really enjoyed this book and the hope it provides even amidst its thornier parts. I liked that the parents are flawed and doing their best, but inside the context of unconditional love and acceptance. That so many transgender children and adults choose to take their own lives (40%) means we have a long way to go as a society.

4/5 Stars. 

Educated - Tara Westover

I shouldn't be surprised anymore when deeply flawed humans have children and end up being deeply flawed parents. I can usually chalk it up to doing the best we can with the gifts and faults we have and hope that kids can offer grace as they get older to realize their parents are, ultimately, human.

But then I read a book like The Glass Castle (you can read that review here), or now, Educated and I realize, yeah that's mostly true, except when it's not and parents make choices so fundamentally flawed that it's is or is almost criminal in nature. 

Neglect. Growing up in Southern Idaho, Tara and her siblings were given access to text books but no instruction to read them. Extremely mistrustful of the government and paranoid about the ramifications of being "dependent" on the government, the parents don't even apply for birth certificates for Tara and her younger siblings. From an early age, the children are expected to assist their father in the junkyard at the base of the property. Metal scrapping in dangerous conditions thanks to their father's love of shortcuts and eschewing of safety precautions, many of the children are deeply injured. Any decision to work elsewhere is seen as a betrayal of the family. 

So when Tara decides she wants more in terms of education, she has to figure it all out herself. She takes the ACT and fakes her way into BYU claiming she completed "home school". The first year is a rough education for Tara who was unaware even of what the word "Holocaust" meant. And she comes to realize some of the deeply troubling beliefs held by her father and the pervasive racism it engenders at home. 

Tara manages to go on and graduate from BYU with a prestigious Gates Scholarship to Cambridge University in England. And she does this all while trying to inform her parents that her older brother was physically and emotionally abusive toward her. Her parents refuse to acknowledge this truth and a rift forms. It's troubling and upsetting and even today far from over. 

There's something about a memoir that really reaches into the shared humanity of us all and life can sometimes be stranger than fiction. I wish Tara the best and hope she continues on a path of healing.

4.5/5

Queenie - Candice Carty-Williams

You have to admit this amazing cover art catches your eye and makes you wonder what might be inside. And the inside is just as beautiful. Queenie Jenkins is on the cusp of something good. She has a steady boyfriend, Tom, who has suggested marriage, and she's landed a job at a magazine. So what if Tom's family is racist and he doesn't seem to care. So what if the job is managing listings and not writing about issues that really matter to Queenie. She's ALMOST there.

And then. She isn't. Tom wants a break. A clean break. And this begins a spiral for Queenie who must confront some of the things that have made her adult life difficult. Painful, heartbreaking episodes from her childhood are hinted, and then drawn out fully as we grieve and learn with Queenie.

At times completely hilarious and then equally heartbreaking, this book really does do it all. Queenie's friends are dismayed and helpless to halt her downward spiral and I felt these same feelings along with them. I felt like Queenie's friend. I was rooting for her. I wanted her to figure out these things she was doing to herself and allowing to happen to herself. The book brings up uncomfortable questions of self acceptance and worth and race. And it does it all in the most excellent writing. 

I was so thrilled to find this book in my mail box courtesy of Scout Press Books. I can't wait to share this book with everyone.

5/5 Stars. 

Lucky Boy - Shanthi Sekaran

My fingers landed on this intriguing book at my library's last used book sale. And I'm so glad this book found me. I had never heard of it before, had never heard of the author either. So I went into the book with a completely open mind and neutral expectations. It completely exceeded anything I could have hoped for in an unknown pick.

Lucky Boy tells the story of two women: Solimar Valdez leaves her tiny Mexican town for a better life in America. In order to get there she has to find a bit of her own way. And it's pretty terrible the things she endures for this opportunity. Immigration and undocumented immigrants seems to be a bit of a hot topic right now (to say the least) and while this book doesn't really take a stance on the politics or legalities of the situation, it does put a very human face on a very vivid picture of suffering and indifference. 

But I digress, because also happening in this novel is a wonderful woman named Kavya who has rebelled against her traditional Indian-American immigrant mother and has struck out on her own. She's married Rishi, an environmental scientist who focuses on clean air projects at the headquarters of Weebies (re: Amazon for babies). Kavya has always gotten her way, no matter how much it displeases her mother and now she wants a baby but is having no luck. Like many, she's forced to empty her savings in order to chase this desire only to come up short time and again. 

So when Solimar (Soli) arrives in the US, her cousin helps find her a position as a house cleaner to a white Berkeley family. And Soli finds out that she has carried something else across the border, a baby, to be born in American, to be American. With only her cousin's support (sometimes begrudging), Soli works as a cleaner and then nanny to the white family after her son, Ignacio, is born. Through a series of bad breaks shortly after Ignacio turns one, Soli is arrested and the boy is put into foster care as her case winds through immigration. Except, well our system for housing, detaining and deporting immigrants is woefully bereft of accountability and efficiency. 

Enter Kavya and Rishi, recently determined to be foster parents as an alternative to continued IVF cycles. When they meet Ignacio, Kavya is instantly bonded to him. He eventually comes to live with them and Kavya puts her whole heart into loving and becoming Ignacio's mother. When she finds out his birth mother, Soli, very much wants her son back, Kavya decides she can fight through the courts, for custody of Ignacio. 

There are bad guys in this story, but it's not Soli or Kavya. They both love Ignacio fiercely and the crux of the book is what is to be done for Ignacio. The story line reminded me somewhat of Light Between Oceans where two mothers yearn for one child. I've never struggled with infertility and I've never had the opportunity to love someone else's child like Kavya, but I found her relatable and sympathetic, despite not agreeing with her position regarding Ignacio. 

The two women in the story are so well written. I'll have to look for more works by Shanthi Sekaran. This book was very well done.

4/5 Stars. 

Inside the O'Briens - Lisa Genova

I'm choosing lately to go back to authors I trust and I know Lisa Genova is going to lay it all out for me on these terrible heartbreaking diseases in a way that makes me really understand not just the science but the humanity.

In Inside the O'Briens, Boston police officer Joe O'Brien begins having irrational outbursts of anger in his late 30s. Pop forward to his early forties and Joe is having a few issues with involuntary movements. A toe that is tapping too much and without Joe really wanting it to. Joe is doing his best to ignore it, but his four kids, all in their early twenties, and his wife, Rosie, are having trouble ignoring it. Finally, Joe's best friend and fellow police officer, and his wife intervene to have him checked out. He's then confronted with the diagnosis. Huntington's Disease. A cruel chromosomal extension of a particular gene that causes symptoms that are an unfair mix of Parkinsons, Alzheimers, and ALS. And with four kids, each child has a 50/50 chance of inheriting this gene. 

So now the mom inside me is reeling as I think about Rosie and having to look at her four children, J.J., Megan, Katie, and Patrick and wonder what awaits them. There is no cure for HD. And a diagnosis means debilitating symptoms leading ultimately to death. J.J., whose wife is newly pregnant, is the first to get tested. Then Megan, then Katie. Patrick prefers not to know. And we all wait with them as they find out their fate. But the great and truly wonderful thing about Genova's writing, is that she lets these characters be themselves. She lets them be so flawed. Not everything in a Genova book is tied up at the end. Not everyone gets to be their own hero. Some of the characters are going to let you down. They're going to disappoint you. And that's very very real.

But also, these diseases don't define the characters. The results, ultimately don't matter. Because they are all still people living with the disease, not an embodiment of the disease itself. Genova lets her characters show the human struggle of maintaining our humanity while a disease strips us of our identities. It's a remarkable thing. 

So I was ready for all of the above, and it still really hit hard. But then, then, Genova switched up the narration and some of the chapters come not from J0e, but from Katie. And there it was. The point of view that I hadn't considered and wasn't ready for. Because I have one sister. And if she had something like this, I'm not sure what that would do to me, to us. And when Katie and Megan have to explore this issue... well I wasn't ready. And there was a lot of ugly crying in my car in my work parking lot as I tried to put myself back together. Sister stuff. It gets me every time.

4/5 Stars.