My rating: 4 (and a bit) of 5 stars

There’s a moment, early doors in this, when Parish effectively says to the reader: “This isn’t for you so I’m going to do this part behind the curtain and come back to you when I’m ready.” That’s the moment when I thought: oh, this is interesting. I love writing which knows what it wants to share, how it wants to share it, and has no worries about making those boundaries explicit with the reader. That’s smart, smart stuff, particularly when it comes to life writing and autobiographical work. It respects both the reader and the creative themselves.

As a whole, I found this an enormously genuine experience. The key metaphor is one of feeling at ‘home’ in oneself, and this is represented by people with actual ‘houses’ for bodies. It’s a little bit Wizard Of Oz at times in terms of the practicalities but I rather loved the deftness and clarity of it: this is a simple journey towards finding one’s home, even if you’ve been dropped somewhere a thousand miles away from it. Soft eloquent art, delivered in a gentle palette, reminded me a lot of How to Be Ace: A Memoir of Growing Up Asexual and although I’d have welcomed a tiny little bit more clarity around structure, I rather loved its independent frame of mind. This story does what it wants to do how it wants to do it, and there’s moments in it which are very moving. A graceful thing.