The House No One Sees

Gr 8 Up–No one ever saw Penny’s old house, the one on the corner that’s blue outside and red inside and so tired of keeping its secrets. No one seems to see Penny either, which is convenient when late on the night of her 16th birthday, an urgent message from her estranged mother pulls Penny away from her crush and her friends and back to the house. Knowing but not wanting to acknowledge what she might find, Penny must reckon with the house’s tendency to distort time and reality in a surrealistic labyrinth of memory and perspective. As the prose present twines with the past in verse, Penny retraces her childhood and examines her mother’s addiction and the havoc it has wrought in Penny’s own life. As she begins to come to terms with the reality of her mother’s decisions and the consequences for both of them, she must walk through her own memories to arrive in the present, beginning to realize along the way that she is more than the empty vessel of her invisible house on the corner. Shifting narrative styles highlight the ways that Penny’s mother’s addiction defined her whole childhood; verse sections from the past are sweetly (painfully) naive, while prose present-tense Penny is more world-weary and aware.