The House No One Sees
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A Michael L. Printz Award Honor Book
A 2026 Bank Street Best Book of the Year
Penelope Ross has always felt like a passenger in her mother’s fairytale - until the night of her 17th birthday, when she is forced to enter her own.
After a text from her estranged mother rips her away from a night with friends, Penny is forced into a kaleidoscope of memories locked inside the dark labyrinth of her childhood home. As Penny wanders between present and past—prose and verse—she must confront her mother's opioid addiction to mend her fractured past. But the house is tricky. The house is impossible. It wants her to dig up the dead to escape. And as Penny walks through herself to find herself, she is not sure she has the courage to free the light she trapped inside.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A teen attempts to forge her own future while navigating her mother's opioid dependency in King's spellbindingly surreal, fairy tale–infused debut. On her 16th birthday, a text message plea for help from her estranged mother finds Penelope Ross reluctantly traveling to her dilapidated childhood home and once again trying to rescue her mother from the grip of "poison apples." But returning to the house that long ago stopped being home awakens a painful labyrinth of suppressed memories that swallows Penny—until she accepts that the only way out is through. Directly addressing her mother and the house, Penny's first-person narration alternates between present-day prose and verse-relayed memories that strive to transform pain into hope through "a kaleidoscope of words." Imagistic and metaphor-driven text enchants, but the fragmented, aching narrative—which examines poverty, neglect, addiction, abuse, and first love through the lens of "Sleeping Beauty," "Snow White," Greek mythology, and more—occasionally feels disjointed, obscuring clarity. Penny's quiet growth from "the house no one sees" to becoming a teen with agency and a future nevertheless casts a dizzying, dazzling spell. Back matter includes a resource list. Penny cues as white. Ages 14–up.
