Synopsis

Following a long-standing feud and looking to settle the score, a woman decides to dismantle her home—alone and by hand—and move it across a frozen pond during a harsh New England winter in this mesmerizing debut.

Home is certainly not where Del’s heart is. After a local scandal led to her parents’ divorce and the rest of her family turned their backs on her, Del left her small town and cut off contact.

Now, with both of her parents gone, a chance has arrived for Del to retaliate.

Her uncle wants the one thing Del inherited: the family home.

Instead of handing the place over, and with no other resources at her disposal, Del decides she will tear the place apart herself—piece by piece.

But Del will soon discover, the task stirs up more than just old memories as relatives—each in their own state of unraveling—come knocking on her door.

This spare, strange, magical book is a story not only about the powerlessness and hurt that run through a family but also about the moments when brokenness can offer us the rare chance to start again.

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Review

This was quite an interesting tale and while it seems bizarre on the surface, if you dive down and read between the lines, you might find that this book is about so much more.

Del (short of Adela) is 24 and hasn’t done much with her life and doesn’t seem to care too much that she is floundering along. She lives with a friend of her dad’s, Tym, who has given her a safe place to live. Until he doesn’t and decides that he wants to live with his latest beau. So Del is out on the street but what timing because her cousin Greg has shown up in town telling her that they want to buy the house she inherited from her mother so they can develop the area. With nothing better to do, she sets off for this small town to see what the family (that she despises) has got in mind. You can tell by how smarmy her Uncle Chuck appears that it will not be in her favor. A deal is struck and Del has about 4 months to move the home she grew up in to another location that she agreed to with her Uncle.

This is where the book got weird (for me anyway). She decides to take the house apart brick by brick (or board by board in this case) and move it to the land she took as part of the deal. So we see her toiling over this house, removing the walls, ceilings, plumbing fixtures, furniture, and everything else to this small plot of land and laying it on tarps. Perhaps dismantling the house was a way she could deal with the destruction of her life with her mother’s accident and death years before, acceptance of her father’s lifestyle before his death, and struggling to discover herself. Or perhaps she was an odd duck and decided to stick it to her uncle and make her new “home” an eyesore for the people that will eventually own homes surrounding it.

I wondered if Del might have some psychological issues of her own that were never discovered because she seemed to self-sabotage herself with jobs, friends, and more. When she moves back to this town, the house has very few utilities. There is no electricity and heat comes from a coal stove. There is running water from a well but she doesn’t seem to take advantage of it much since she rarely bathes or showers. She is a loner but manages to befriend a few people in the town including the waitress at the local diner where she eats from time to time. But despite her attitude, she manages to have a few people willing to help her in her endeavors with the house.

I enjoyed the last couple of chapters and found that Del might have learned something about herself and those around her. I don’t think it changed her much, but perhaps she found a new self-worth…or maybe not. Only time will tell for her.

We give this book 3 paws up.

About the Author

A native of New England, Colleen Hubbard now lives in the U.K. with her family. She wrote her debut novel, Housebreaking, while on maternity leave from her job with the NHS. She graduated from the University of East Anglia’s MA program in creative writing, where she earned the Head of School Prize with a distinction.

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