The boy who steals houses

30th Apr, 2025

Tonight I read a book.

This was sorta unintentional. I mean, I intended to start reading a book, but not exactly to finish it. I was meant to get up about two hours ago and get back to homework.

But it was a good book, and worth rereading. For 3 hours, I got to be somewhere else, be someone else.

Their life is quite different to mine, but so much of what they feel, what they think, how they navigate it is the same. The same heart made of confusion and desperate wishes, a love that gets itself turned around and wrapped up in things it shouldn't - but it has to, by nature.

One of my favourite things about The Boy Who Steals Houses is how often it just doesn't explain. There are multiple points, usually the ends of chapters but also the actual ending of the book, where the reader is not told precisely what happens. The choices and possibilities are presented to us, as they are to the character. We make it as far as teetering on the edge of decision-

-and then it stops there. It's up to you to decide, if you like, what you think those characters, these people, would have done. What exactly occured, in-between this page and the start of the next chapter.

What their futures turned out to be, after the final words of the book.

It's sweet, because the happy ending is presented as an option, despite the tense tone of the last few chapters. Time and time again during the story, the main character's expectations are pleasantly, surprisingly, beautifully subverted. Sometimes the hammer blow never comes. And the threads are there, at the end - happiness is a possibility. Sunlight-yellow and within reach, if we just grasp for it.

But we don't know for sure. And there is always the other option - that the consequences are just too much to outrun this time. That he has just too much to heal from, and not enough time, and sometimes the love just isn't enough.

I can't relate to anyone who would want to imagine that ending to the book, but the threads of that possibility are woven through it. Perhaps that matters. I know I appreciate it, artistically. But I hope he got his house full of sunlight in the end.

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I first read this book almost 4 years ago. That time I finished at about 3:07am, which I know because I immediately got up and wrote an email to the author. I think it's probably the most convoluted, rambling, heartsick thing I have ever written to another human being, a pouring out of the amalgam creature I was, still surfacing from someone else's life. I fucking loved this book, and I still do.

To my great and enduring surprise, they replied - a little under a week later, at 9pm here. Nothing flashy or fanciful or nearly as incomprehensible as my email. Just a single paragraph expressing gratitude that I'd appreciated their 'little book', and well wishes, and a yellow heart at the end. Of course it made my fucking day.

It's such a strange pseudo-relationship to have with someone. You have never met, they do not know you, you do not know them... but perhaps those characters they wrote, fictional figments of people expressed across a mournfully short 354 pages, people who don't technically exist - they've changed your life a little. Even if it's just until you finish resurfacing.

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To get to the part of this entry that makes a little more sense: The Boy Who Steals Houses by C. G. Drews is just an exceptionally good book.

The pacing is quite excellent, which is sometimes unusual for YA novels. I do in fact feel like I believeably lived a month in the last three hours. The author plays with page formatting in a wonderful way, breaking up sentences and even whole words across lines to visually convey the emotional stake of a scene. Some parts of this book are not meant to be read so much as viewed, experienced.

The characters have depth, multiple and often conflicting sides to them. Choices are made that they desperately do not want to make, but must. Even more heartbreakingly, so many moments of the soft way, the easy answers, of happiness are passed up and pushed away, in a way that is complex and so fucking relatable.

It is a beautiful example of the fact that you can write characters with traumas and mental illnesses and aspects of neurodiversity that rule their lives in many ways, but the story still doesn't have to be about that.

It is, as I said to a friend,

It's about... loneliness, and forgiveness, and trust and loyalty and love
and a kid who doesn't know how to cope with the world, but is a little too stubborn to stop trying

It's just a good book.

I'm running out of words that I can use to champion this without actually dipping into the story and spoiling it, so I'm not going to. But I hope this persuades perhaps even one person to read it, if they haven't - and perhaps one more from there, and another from there. And so the ripples run outwards. I know I am better for having read this, and better again for having revisited it.

Let me know if you do. I'd love to talk about it. And...

If lost, please return to the De Laineys.

💚💚