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How long does it take to read This Is How It Always Is?

Laurie Frankel

This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel takes about 6 hours 10 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 6 hours 10 minutes

A weekend read

First published 2017. 336 pages, about 92,400 words.

13 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 10 hours 16 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 6 hours 10 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 3 hours 51 minutes

The page count is the median across 10 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About 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. When Rosie and Penn and their four boys welcome the newest member of their family, no one is surprised it's another baby boy. At least their large, loving, chaotic family knows what to expect. But Claude is not like his brothers. One day he puts on a dress and refuses to take it off. He wants to bring a purse to kindergarten. He wants hair long enough to sit on. When he grows up, Claude says, he wants to be a girl. Rosie and Penn aren't panicked at first. Kids go through phases, after all, and make-believe is fun. But 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"--

Subjects: Family secrets, Parents of transgender children, Families, Transgender children, Parenting, Parent and child

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