Home Home by Lisa Allen-Agostini (review)

The book opens as our fourteen-year-old narrator is in the middle of a panic attack, trying to find her way to the bus stop in Edmonton, Alberta, where it’s way too cold and way too white for this Trini girl. A phone call with her best friend helps her pull herself together and get to Aunt Jillian and her temporary home, where she’s been sent to discreetly recover from a mental crisis. Jillian and her partner, Julie, are welcoming and supportive, but even guiding the protagonist to appropriate psychiatric care cannot fully protect her from her own demons. There’s a relapse, but there’s also powerful incentive toward stability in Josh, a too-cute-to-be-believed friend of the family who is as kind as he is smitten. Kayla, whose name readers learn only at the novel’s resolution, is fully credible in her struggle to simultaneously wrangle displacement, unconditional love, and life-long mental illness. In effort to compare/contrast Canadian and Trinidadian social mores on race and gay culture, though, Allen-Agostini occasionally spins stiff conversations that feel more instructive than convincing. Even Josh comes equipped with a contrived backstory to make him the ideal boyfriend to help Kayla navigate her white majority environs and courageously embrace her new regime of medication and talk therapy. Nonetheless, warmth and lyricism suffuse the compact text, making this a moving quick pick.