You'd Be Home Now

Literary fiction

Print length: 400 pagesDelacorte Press, 2021

Description

In Mill Haven, Emmy is publicly known as a wealthy heiress and privately defined by the work of caring for her older brother, Joey. A car crash that kills Candy MontClaire exposes the severity of Joey’s drug use and leaves the town grieving. Four months later, Emmy begins her junior year as Joey returns from rehabilitation, but neither sibling can simply resume the roles their family and neighbors assigned them. Emmy starts questioning who she is when she is not managing someone else’s crisis and looking beyond the town’s fixed stories about addiction. The novel follows a family confronting opioids, guilt, and grief while learning how easily labels can conceal the complicated people beneath them.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Conversational · Direct · Lyrical

Pace

Moderate

Tone

Earnest · Hopeful · Intimate · Melancholic

Structure

Linear

Focus

Character · Relationships

Emotional intensity

5 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 2 / 5
Ideas: 2 / 5
Structure: 2 / 5
Background knowledge: 1 / 5

Themes

AddictionBelongingFamilyGriefGuiltIdentity

About Kathleen Glasgow

Kathleen Glasgow writes young adult fiction about teenagers living through grief, addiction, self-harm, and unstable forms of home. A poet before she became a novelist, she brings spare, lyrical compression to scenes of crisis, often using fragmentary passages and direct, conversational language to keep the narrative close to a young person’s shifting perceptions. Her plots do not treat recovery as a clean reversal. They follow its routines, setbacks, negotiations, and dependence on other people, while giving equal attention to shame and practical survival. Girl in Pieces traces Charlie’s attempt to rebuild a life after self-harm and devastating losses. How to Make Friends with the Dark moves through foster care with Tiger after her mother’s death, widening private mourning into questions of kinship and belonging. In You’d Be Home Now, a sibling’s opioid addiction becomes both a family emergency and a public story imposed by a small town. Glasgow repeatedly examines the gap between those fixed labels and the complicated inner lives they conceal.

Books by Kathleen Glasgow

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Delacorte Press
Language: English
ISBN: 9780525708056

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