Call Me Home

Starred review from January 19, 2015
Lydia and Jackson grew up hiding in the woods of Washington state whenever their parents fought; they had to help their mother, Amy, clean the house after their father, Gary, broke her arm. Kruse’s sweeping debut novel tells of a life punctuated by violence and underscored with fear—a life that Amy hopes has enough moments of beauty for her children. After a particularly bad argument, Gary pushes her out of the window, and she knows that this time, she must get her children away from him for good. After 18-year-old Jackson, torn between hate for his father and an intense desire for a father figure, gives Gary some potentially dangerous information about Amy, she is forced to flee with Lydia to Texas to start a new life. Burdened by guilt but determined to give her 13-year-old daughter a sense of hope, Amy reexamines her relationship with Gary, trying to pinpoint the moment when love became fear. Meanwhile, Jackson flees from smalltown Washington to Portland, and then to Idaho, where he finds work on a construction crew and falls into a passionate affair with Don, his married boss. The anxieties and ecstasies of this love carry him into adulthood and away from the brutality of his childhood. Amy, Lydia, and Jackson must redefine their own ideas of family as they try desperately to move on and make lives for themselves. A powerful story told with ferocity and grace.

February 15, 2015
This debut novel tells the story of an abusive marriage and its aftermath from the points of view of the wife, Amy, and her two teenage children, Lydia and Jackson. After Jackson, who is gay, betrays his mother and sister for reasons that are never made clear, he leaves for Portland, where he first prostitutes himself and then lands a construction job in Idaho, where he begins a doomed relationship with his handsome boss, who is married. In the meantime, Amy, with Lydia, flees to her hometown in Texas where the two find shelter with Amy's mother, all the while living in terror at the prospect that Gary, Amy's husband and Lydia's father, might find them. As the story moves backward and forward in time, the lives that Kruse limns emerge as desperately unhappy ones, survived rather than lived. And their world is relentlessly, depressingly ugly, seemingly without hope. This unrelieved bleakness will test the patience of some readers, but, in the end, the art Kruse brings to her endeavor will carry the day.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)