Once upon a time, there was a little doll who lived in a house perched on the corner of a busy street with bright lights. The road was so busy and the lights so bright that no one could see the house. The doll lived with a princess who slept and slept and almost never woke up. The doll tried to wake the sleeping princess, but once the princess opened her eyes, she called the little doll terrible names. The little doll ran from the house and found a new version of home. But some part of her remained, buried deep in the foundation of the house that no one saw.
The doll is really Penelope Ross, a 16-year-old girl trying to both outrun and unravel the memories of a childhood spent in the trenches of her mother’s drug addiction. On the night of her 16th birthday, surrounded by friends, Penny is finally feeling the sense of normalcy that the doll never could—until the sleeping princess sends a text, summoning her back home.
In the tradition of Carmen Maria Machado, whose acclaimed memoir, In the Dream House, details an abusive relationship through surrealist vignettes, Adina King’s debut novel The House No One Sees depicts a young person who has built a labyrinth of trauma and grief and must subsequently learn the art of both deconstructing and reconstructing her life. Machado’s memoir quotes the artist Louise Bourgeois: “You pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architecture.”
Written in a hybrid form of verse and prose, Penny’s story comes in nonlinear pieces. In the present, Penny navigates her way through the house and a flood of memories, while the details of her past are filtered through poems. Though King’s metaphors occasionally become muddled, this figurative exploration of the effects of parental drug addiction is brilliant. After all, trauma and its aftermath is not usually a legible experience: It exists in the margins of a life, coloring everything contained in between. The House No One Sees is not a perfect book, but it is an important one that might offer a guiding light to countless other little dolls.
