The Family That Carried Their House on Their Backs by Sammie Downing Blog Tour: Review

Book people! I’m lucky enough to be on the blog tour for The Family That Carried Their House on Their Back by Sammie Downing! This fantasy novella tells the unique story of a family trying to keep the calls from the darkness at bay.

As you scroll through, make sure you check out the synopsis, my review, and a little bit about the author, I think a lot of you would love this short book! Alright, let’s get to the post!

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The Family That Carried Their House on Their Backs by Sammie Downing

Released February 13, 2019
89 pages, paperback

Young Miriam is born into a world where women carry houses stitched to their backs, while men carry keys with the power to unlock them. Miriam’s nomadic family moves from clearing to clearing within a dark wood, but no matter how deep into the forest they travel, the haunted calls of Wild Things follow. Slowly, Miriam begins to understand that her family might not be as human as it appears.

Praise

“The Family that Carried Their House on Their Backs is a magical story and a family story; its magic evolves from its unfaltering attention to how family—as captivity, as inheritance—can feel. Sammie Downing rediscovers the pure facts of love and and wildness in the spare, strange folklore through which her characters set out. A wise and stunning novella of intense tenderness.” —Mark Mayer, author of The Aerialists, an Indie Next Selection and Electric Literature Best Debut

“Sisters Miriam and Essie struggle with their parents’ sometimes devastating imperfections and what it means to grow up, grow apart, and grow together. In these ghostly bites of prose, Sammie Downing gives us glimpses through windowpanes to the unsettling world of Houses and Hollows, Wild Things and severed keys, and sisters mirrored.” —Emily Capettini, author of Thistle, winner of the Omnidawn Fabulist Fiction Prize

Amazon | Half Mystic | Goodreads

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Review

I don’t quite know how to start this review. This book hit in a lot of emotional places for me. A lot of Miriam and Essie’s journey throughout this book felt familiar despite it being fantasy, but that’s what the best fantasy does. The book starts out talking about how they play with Barbies and that immediately connected me to them from the start. And everything they went through with their parents just tightened the hold they had on my heart even more.

Miriam’s father is absent a lot because of what he is and the transformation he’s going through, and while I don’t have that exact same experience, Miriam’s thoughts and feelings about him struck quite the cord with me. Her mother’s silence and/or refusal to understand what he was and that his actions would never changed also punched me right in the throat.

But I also felt for the situation the mother has been put in. She has to carry this house on her back, gathering more and more things, and when her husband goes off and becomes wild, she has to pack everything up with her daughters and find a new place to put down roots. It was her only choice unless she wanted to become one of The Wild Things.

More than anything, I want to hold Miriam and Essie close by and make sure nothing bad ever happens to them because they are so precious and sweet and young and even with what Miriam experiences in the book and begins to understand, I still want to protect her from the world. Too bad even in this book world, little girls don’t get to stay that way for long

Beyond the emotion this book brought up,  the writing also completely blew me away. While this is definitely written as a story, it reads like prose poetry to me. The imagery, the setting, Miriam’s descriptions of certain actions and things around her all felt very poetic and atmospheric.

I’m giving The Family That Carried Their House on Their Backs by Sammie Downing 4 out of 5 stars. If you’re looking for an intriguing fantasy story (that might punch you in the heart), I definitely recommend checking this out.

Thank you to the author and Half Mystic Press for the free eARC in exchange for my honest review.

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About the Author

Sammie Downing has been been a housekeeper, a huntress and a fraud investigator. She lives in Denver, Colorado.