Finding Home

by Dominic Sheehan, D.C. Sheehan

It’s 1976. Jaws is playing at the movie theater, ABBA clogs the radio, and nine-year-old Kevin Garrick is growing up in Lumley, a town not so small that everyone knows everybody else, but small enough that most people know a little bit of everything that goes on.

Kevin loves living in Lumley. He loves his friends. He loves the two-storied house he calls home. He even loves his peculiar younger brother, the one who thinks he’s a horse.

But Kevin’s happy world is about to fracture and he will need to be brave in order to stand against the changes that threaten everyone he loves. In doing so he will learn how hard it is to cling to hope when surrounded by loss, and that sometimes love and sorrow go hand-in-hand.

Finding Home is a funny, poignant, and absorbing tale of childhood and small town life, equal parts gothic and light—a story about losing home and finding it again.

232 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Author also writes under D.C. Sheehan

Reviews

[Steve Charters · Rating 3 out of 5]

Memoir as novel: a naive, imaginative pubescent boy in small-town New Zealand in the mid-seventies - period details are well-captured. There are strong echoes of other novels of childhood: Morrieson's 'The Scarecrow', 'The Member of the Wedding' and 'Jane Eyre' with oppressive teachers, the death of a childhood friend and the Madwoman locked in the basement who escapes at night causing consternation. The child's point-of-view is rendered quite convincingly though at times the older authorial voice obtrudes.

Though this is a large catholic family with six children, four of them are conveniently shuffled offstage early on, which felt a little contrived. The hints of a possibly divergent sexuality are so oblique as to be negligible so that the narrator comes across as rather innocent or obtuse.

[D.C. Sheehan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finding Home is my first published novel and, although it isn’t autobiographical, it’s based in the time and place I grew up and features elements taken from my childhood. It is a slice-of-life family drama, set in its time, but with timeless themes of kinship, bravery, and resilience. It’s a stand-alone tale and not a part of The Mythic series.

[Denise Mallard · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this story
So well written and such a clever portrayal of how young minds process feelings of love, compassion, dread, guilt and facing the consequences of certain choices…