Your Rightful Home

by Alyssa Knickerbocker

Lydia was your neighbor, the childhood friend you spent all your time with. Then a lie sends Lydia running out of your front door, after which she disappears. In Your Rightful Home we follow the life of a woman from childhood to adulthood and her struggle to discover who she is in the light of a tragedy she feels she may have caused. Are the formative powers of loss insurmountable? Can a single indiscretion define a person’s entire life?

61 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Alyssa Knickerbocker is a writer and teacher living on the Kitsap Peninsula in Washington State. Her fiction is forthcoming or appears in Alaska Quarterly Review, West Branch, Five Chapters, American Short Fiction, The Carolina Quarterly, Brooklyn Magazine, and The Best of the West 2011: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri, among others.

She is the recipient of many awards, scholarships and fellowships, including the Halls Emerging Artist Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and the Axton Fellowship in Fiction at the University of Louisville. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Reviews

[Gary Butler · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is less than 80 pages which is the cut off line for a book to be entered onto my all time book list. I do not really consider this to be a book at all. This is more like a long short story. This is well worth your time to read. It took just under 2 hours to get through it. I loved the way it was written. I believe it is second person and the story keeps referring to "you" the reader as the main character. The story is about life and the choices we make. Just beautiful. Highly recommended 5/5

GaryReviews

In compliance with FTC guidelines, I am disclosing in my review that I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads.

[Brandon Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this AMAZING novella, Alyssa Knickerbocker captures the blanket, unchoosing-of-favorites cruelty of the world with beautiful prose that grabs you from go and takes you with it, holding you by the throat as a simple childhood mistake takes on horrific weight that haunts the You the narrator describes through childhood, then bleakly quickly (as happens to us all) into a whirlwind of confusing adolescence where You just start to deal with the effects of your childhood when You are dropped off by life into the land of adulthood, where You are equally confused and unprepared, and find yourself raising a daughter of your own, on your own -- relating to your mother more than you'd like to, but still unable to really communicate with her fully -- understanding this little girl playing outside in the grass while you do the dishes as little as you do yourself.

This novella bummed me out bigtime, but in the best way. I'd just read a silly novel that was empty before I decided to finally pick this up. It's work like this that looks life in the face that makes reading more than just a hobby but elevates it into a way of reflecting on life in ways we'd never be able to otherwise. I can't wait to read more Knickerbocker.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful novella that tells a tale about a woman who's life is framed by a childhood tragedy. Her unfounded guilt haunts her; whether she is near or far from home, at all points of her life.

The second-person narrative style plunges you into the story immediately -- ,you are the protagonist, you yearn for courage, for normalcy, for happiness. The books features vignettes of your life: poignant parts that bring up memories of your missing childhood friend Lydia. This style traps you from the start: you are invested in you. You want ,your life to be sunshine and rainbows. But of course, reality is, it never is.

The book reflects and contrasts the intrinsic and extrinsic aspects of living: the memories that stay with you and form your being, compared to the ever changing settings that growing up and growing old brings. The former is constant, the latter more dynamic. But yet, they act in synergy.

A haunting read.

[Autumn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I won this book from the goodreads giveaway..


i was slightly confused by the narration of the book but once i became familiar with it i began to enjoy the story though i wish it was longer and my indepth..

[Marcie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful. Can't wait to read more by this new/young author!