A VERY FINE HOUSE

A teen tries to save an abandoned mansion in Molina’s coming-of-age YA novel.

Thirteen-year-old Letty Marquez has always been drawn to ornate old houses. When her friend Lynn discovers an empty Victorian mansion on the far side of the wrought iron fence behind their school, Letty insists she take her and their other friends to see it. Back home in her large family’s crowded apartment, Letty can’t stop thinking about the house. (“I couldn’t believe that anything like that existed in that town. Why hadn’t anyone ever mentioned it before? Could it be possible that everyone had forgotten about it?”) Letty and her friends make a pact to make the house their secret hangout and get to work learning all they can about the property. It turns out the house is owned by the nearby hospital and was built almost a century earlier by a wealthy businessman for his daughter, Afton, on the occasion of her marriage. As the chaos of the early 1970s rages around them, Letty and her friends seek to uncover information about the life of the mysterious Afton Fellows, who was preceded in death by her husband and all three of her children. Letty, the child of Mexican immigrants, thinks she’s finally acquired a piece of the American dream, but when the hospital’s expansion threatens the house, she and her friends must scramble to save it. Molina’s clean prose captures Letty’s awakening to the ways of the world, from her family’s place in America to the perspective of her parents, often rooted in her own generation’s signifiers: “She didn’t want to be living her life any more than I wanted to be living mine,” Letty realizes about her mother. “Was I going to end up like her? Then it dawned on me what the Rolling Stones meant by ‘Mother’s Little Helper.’ Obviously hippies weren’t the only ones looking to escape.” The characters could be richer, and the tone less earnest. This is likely a novel that will appeal more to nostalgic members of the author’s generation than current teens.

A sincere if thin YA novel.