What is “home”? Is it a physical place we occupy? A memory? A group of people? A time? In Pamela Todd’s Blind Faith Hotel, we search for home and find it in unexpected places.
Fourteen-year-old Zoe feels like her whole world is going to pieces. Zoe’s mother takes her kids away from their father, a fisherman who ships out to Alaska, and moves them to a run-down farmhouse she’s inherited in the Midwest. Surrounded by strangers and a sea of prairie grass, Zoe loses her bearings: she misses her father and the sea fiercely; she battles with her mother daily; and she’s searching for answers to the changes all around and inside her. Zoe acts out and is placed in a work program at a local nature preserve. But the work starts to ground and steady her. When she meets a wild boy who shares her love of untamed places, it seems he might help Zoe find her way.
Todd’s story is funny and poignant; full of angst and yearning; and rings true in its depiction of a teen’s the search for true self, a place to belong in the world, and the meaning of “home.”
- Posted by Cori