Review: How to Build A House, Dana Reinhardt

How to Build a House
Dana Reinhardt

Official Summary:
Harper's Dad is getting a divorce from her beloved stepmother, Jane. Even worse, Harper has lost her stepsister, Tess; the divorce divides them. Harper decides to escape by joining a volunteer program to build a house for a family in Tennessee who lost their home in a tornado. Not that she knows a thing about construction.

Soon she’s living in a funky motel and working long days in blazing heat with a group of kids from all over the country. At the site, she works alongside Teddy, the son of the family for whom they are building the house. Their partnership turns into a summer romance, complete with power tools. Learning to trust and love Teddy isn’t easy for Harper, but it’s the first step toward finding her way back home.

What the Pros Say:
PW: "Reinhardt artfully parallels the construction of a house with the reconstruction of a broken family in a work as intimate and intelligently wrought as her previous YA novels."

Kirkus: "a well-paced first-person narrative spiced with summer flings and teen romance."

What I Say:
I'd heard good things about both of Reinhardt's previous novels, A Brief History of My Impossible Life and Harmless, but I've never actually read either one. Nonetheless, I was pretty excited when I spotted How to Build a House on the shelves at the bookstore. I was expecting a light, fun, summer romance, and I got that and more.

Harper's family is literally being torn apart, which means losing the woman who has been like a mother to her, the stepsister who has been her best friend for as long as she can remember, and the sense of safety that having a family gave her. Unable to deal, Harper flees, and it is as she rebuilds a house in Tennessee she finds herself slowly rebuilding her life at the same time.

Harper was a charming and relatable narrator. She was clearly flawed, but at the same time she never veered into the pathetic or the obnoxious. Instead, I loved watching as her confidence and sense of self worth grew--she slowly discovered that she was worthy of love regardless of the actions of those around her, and it was an exciting transformation to view.

Plotwise, the book didn't have too many surprises, but I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. It wasn't monotonous in the least, instead, while I had an idea of what might come next, I found myself eagerly flipping the pages to find out what would happen with Harper and Teddy, Harper and Tess, and Harper and herself.

I also think that this book addresses an interesting question that's becoming more and more important these days, and that I don't think I've seen dealt with in very many other books. What do we do when so-called "blended" families unblend? When a family is connected by love, but not by blood, what happens when the legal connections binding them together dissolve? I think that it's an important question to ask, and Dana Reinhardt offers intriguing answers in this book.

Intrigued?
Visit Dana Reinhardt's website to find out more about her and her books.