The House We Grew Up In

Listeners will discover a most endearing and disturbing character in Lorelei Bird, whom Karina Fernandez captures to a tee. The mother of four is a hoarder whose addiction eventually causes most of her family to leave her. Fernandez captures each distinctive Bird family member, particularly Lorelei, who's at once childlike in her enthusiasms and fiercely determined to give her children model childhoods. The story centers around years of Easter Sunday celebrations, with the Birds seeming like the ideal family until tragedy strikes when 16-year-old Rhys commits suicide, leaving Lorelei's belief system shattered. The story's many characters are well served as the author illuminates the drive to hoard. S.G.B. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine

June 23, 2014
Jewell’s most recent novel (after Before I Met You) is a melodrama starring the Bird clan: happy-go-lucky mother Lorelai, patient father Colin, headstrong eldest child Meg, meek Beth, and dissimilar twins Rory and Rhys. “They lived in a honey-colored house that sat hard up against the pavement of a picture-perfect Cotswolds village and stretched out beyond into three-quarters of an acre of rambling half-kempt gardens.” The narrative alternates between 2011 and flashbacks to the kids’ childhoods, and the reader sees Lorelai’s eccentricities (including her propensity for hoarding) gradually begin to weigh her family down. Easter is Lorelai’s favorite holiday, replete with massive egg hunts and festivities, but when a catastrophe occurs, it forever alters the course of the Birds’ lives. Each member of the family begins to drift away from the others, and the subsequent years find them dealing with affairs, abandonment, and death. Years later, following another loss, the family once again gathers and is forced to confront its troubled past. Jewell keeps the reader engrossed with her characters’ winding, divergent paths.