The House We Grew Up In by Lisa Jewell

Lisa Jewell is a dab hand at describing the kinds of messy problems and festering secrets that can assail even the most apparently happy and ‘normal’ of families. The House We Grew Up In follows the story of the Birds, an English middle class family who have had to deal with something so terrible, that somehow it has driven them all apart.

You might be inclined to blame Lorelei, mother of daughters Meg and Beth, and twins Rory and Rhys. Lorelei is a cartwheeling, mad-about-rainbows hippy, who never throws away any of the children’s art, sentimental even about their outgrown clothes. Every year she holds an Easter Egg hunt in their Cotswolds garden, long after her children are too old for such things.

As the years pass her sentimentality for old things turns into a compulsive hoarding disorder to the point where their once picture-perfect house has become a nightmare of teetering piles of newspapers, stacks of plastic bags, with each room bulging at the seams. The book starts off with Meg, now the mother of her own four children, back at her childhood home with teenage daughter, Molly, embarking on the difficult task of sorting out her late mother’s possessions.

And yet the house has one room still free from clutter. Shifting between past and present, Jewell slowly fills in the story of a terrible tragedy that happened one Easter Sunday, years ago. Who is at fault is a question that lingers. Meanwhile the children, Lorelei and father Colin, fail to deal with what happened – the proverbial elephant in the room – and this has repercussions for all.

I thought Jewell did well with her story about a family that should be a happy one but isn’t and why. The characters are all a bit of a mess in completely different ways, but each is well-rounded and this creates empathy with the reader. You do have to keep your wits about you, though, with the jumping-around timeline (I was forever flipping back to see what year we were up to and then doing equations in my head to work out the characters’ ages). Nevertheless, I did keep reading as I became really invested in the Bird family in what turned out to be almost a page-turner.

Posted by JAM

Catalogue link: The House We Grew Up In