I absolutely loved this book! The main character, Del, has a no-holds-barred sense of the absurd and a basic distaste for social convention that kept me snort-laughing from the get-go. Her honest assessments of people, places, and events and her responses to them were the driver of this book for me, rather than the story itself. I read it in a day and a half, and it’s entertainment value never waned. At the same time, it presents the reader with situations that inspire self-reflection around family values, personal experiences, and our relationships with others. A winner all around and a promising debut for a talented writer.

Many things for book clubs to unpack!
I honestly didn’t think I’d like this book. A 20 something who can’t hold a job and apparently doesn’t have any thoughts about the future just isn’t something that appeals. However, I quickly grew enchanted with Del and her story and had a hard time putting the book down. Turned out she had a lot more going on than someone scrounging for rent. Loved her determination, her detection and response to BS, and her humanity. Loved how we learn about Del’s past and that, for some of it, there were no pat answers or tidy explanations. I found the other characters in the book realistically characterized - likable, not likable and sometimes both. I LOLed while reading the Christmas party chapter. I can see this being a movie. Great debut novel. I hope we see more from this author.

Del has never gotten along with her family, and things haven’t improved since her parents death. Del has long held a simmering hatred for her uncle, the man who shunned her mother after her parents divorce. Now, Del has the one thing her uncle covets above everything else – the family home. Instead of just handing the home over to her uncle, the teen decides to take the house apart, piece by piece, board by board. This is an unusual story about a strong female protagonist ready to burn all her bridges to get some measure of revenge

I am genuinely unsure if this book was genuinely as uninteresting and predictable as it often felt to me, or if it is such a brilliant metaphor I am just unable to rise to the author’s expectation. I get that dismantling the house is dismantling a life and tumultuous family history, but I am not sure this creates any real growth for anyone. The cast of characters that orbit Del as she takes on this spite-project are interesting, and they certainly undergo change. However, when the story wraps up, everyone is just doing basically the same things in the same small town. Granted, that may be a much more realistic take on human nature, but I am not sure I needed to spend an entire novel’s worth of words watching Del make life infinitely harder for herself to get that message. I would genuinely say to anyone asking about this book: I don't know if it was good, but I think every reader will get something out of it.

This was an unusual story about characters that seemed real and complicated and human to me. The book avoided going down the usual paths - less drama, no violence, no big love story, no big triumphs or tragedies. No horrible villains, no bigger-than-life heroes. Just a quiet story about a girl working out some truths about her family and herself and learning what she was capable of and how to truly see the people around her. At the same time, there were intriguing aspects to the challenge Del meets in the book - I will never think about houses and how they are built or what they mean to families living in them again. I enjoyed this story and look forward to other books by this author.

I am grateful to NetGalley and to Berkeley Publishing Group for giving me an advanced reader’s copy of a fabulous new book by first time novelist Colleen Hubbard entitled Housebreaking. The book is scheduled for publication in April 2022. I enjoyed it immensely, despite the fact that few of it’s characters have many redeeming qualities.

The protagonist is a young, headstrong, teenage girl who’s parents have died and who has few friends except for the gay male friends of her late father. The only surviving family she has is her late mother’s brother and his 3 sons, all of whom she detests, and his wife, whom she barely tolerates. She drifts from job to job and has no assets, until she learns that her mother’s dilapidated, old house, in which she grew up and that which she inherited, is the only obstacle to her uncle’s plan to subdivide the land upon which it sits and build a housing complex. To spite her uncle , she proposes to accept less money for the house in exchange for a small piece of land that isn’t buildable and time to demolish the house herself.

She immediately sets to work dismantling the house piece by piece and dragging the pieces across a frozen pond to her newly acquired patch of land. Although she prefers solitude and rejects most people with whom she is forced to interact during this time, she finds that she has made a genuine friend in the end.

Take the long way home

Family trauma? Housebreaking offers the hard way of coping: literally dismantling your old life by tearing down your childhood home, shingle by shingle. The misanthropic Del here is so committed to making life hard on herself that I was reminded of characters like Eleanor in ‘Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine’ and May Attaway in ‘Rules For Visiting.’

Read for the quirky moments as unwanted guests and family try to talk her out of it, then insist on helping and worm their way through her defenses. Del has her most human moments with the gay friends of her dead father, and with a young gay man: a nice window on gay-adjacent life.

Read for a coming-of-age moment when someone who quits all the time … learns she absolutely won’t quit on this one thing.

Read for that liminal state between school and adulthood when one foot is in each world and strange things are possible.

Housebreaking was an unsatisfying read for me. I couldn’t bring myself to believe in Del’s commitment to tearing down the family home, couldn’t imagine her drive to do it all herself. The character connections are the big draw in this book. Del starts the story rooming with an older male friend of her father. It seemed an unlikely choice, and yet it became evident that there was a lasting, strong connection between them. I marveled at the two women who stayed with Del—there was so little to adequately house them. One had enough money to go somewhere comfortable and warm, yet she moves in with Del, who doesn’t want company. I also liked the connection with Billy, who feels he doesn’t fit in as his family wishes, but is willing to help Del, which makes his family happy. Del is unexpectedly generous to others, even as she is as much in need as they are. The characters made the story for me, but the story just didn’t make it.

This was a treat! The writing is assured and much attention is given to the characters and description. I was rooting for Del all the way, holding my breath at times wondering how I would feel living in my old home in the midst of dismantling, how would I handle this or that. Colleen Hubbard somehow managed to make Del’s story so real – despite some really insane moves in my opinion – that I was running a parallel scenario on how real it sounded to me. It’s a book and a story whose main character gets a hold of you and doesn’t let go. I could not relate to her living conditions and some of her choices and yet somehow it made sense for her. It’s one of those books that when you read about the cold peeking and the snow blowing you feel yourself freezing and you shiver inside. Del sets her own course, braves obstacles and we are lucky as readers to get an inside peek of her while the people in her life are held at a distance. Highly recommend! I can’t wait to read what Colleen Hubbard writes next.

I absolutely love this fiction novel. I felt so much for the main character. I really identified with her. This book is such a well told story. I highly recommend it.