Housebound by Elizabeth Gentry

Title: Housebound
Author: Elizabeth Gentry
Type: Novel
Genre: Fiction
Series: No
Pages: 235
Copyright: 2013
Publisher: Lake Forest College Press
Rating: 3 out of 5

Summary:
Elizabeth Gentry’s debut, Housebound, is a novel like no other: a disquieting and interior fairy-tale adventure through one family’s secrets and lies. Maggie, the eldest daughter, is preparing to leave the house in which she’s lived, worked, and been educated her whole life: a life led seemingly without contact with the outside world, save in the form of weekly trips to the library for the stories that are the only escape for Maggie and her eight brothers and sisters. Maggie’s seeming estrangement from the most familiar details of her life give the novel an almost Kafkaesque feel, as if Kafka had been born an Appalachian woman.

Feelings:
Housebound is not your typical novel. At first I thought it was a young adult novel, the narrator is nineteen, but now I'm not sure I would call it young adult. It has a darker side than most young adult. There is a more literary side to it as well that isn't present in most young adult novels.

This was a odd story about a young woman preparing to leave home and her discoveries as she is finally freed from the rules of her family and able to see the world around her. She remembers a forgotten childhood full of strange occurrences that she didn't understand at the time and this ignored. Behind all of the strangeness is a secret and that secret is hinted at from the very beginning he see the aftermath and distraction the secret has caused for the family but it is only slowly revealed to us. 

This is a book I would recommend to just anyone. It did hold my interest, however, because the story is mostly in remembering it was slow at times. This story wants reader that is enjoys lyric writing and methodical pacing.