Calling Me Home - by Laurin Becker Macios (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A beautifully crafted YA novel in verse that follows a 17-year-old girl's backpacking trip across Europe--filled with awe, danger, friendships, and something like love.

Jenny Campbell, recent high school graduate, has spent her unrooted childhood planning for a future she can control: NYU, marketing major, big-city life. But first, a carefully mapped solo backpacking trip through Europe.

Only, the trip doesn't stay on the map. As she travels between countries and memories, Jenny begins to loosen her grip on the life she's scripted. She works at a bookshop in Greece, treks through the Balkans on overnight trains, falls in something-like-love in Rome.

At summer's end, Jenny returns to the States ready to launch her New York City future. And then, she learns she's pregnant. Choosing to end her pregnancy, Jenny tries to keep her plans--but finds she may no longer be the person meant to live them.

Calling Me Home is part classic travel bildungsroman (you can almost taste the ouzo in Greece and feel the wind of Ireland) and part meditation on how abortion is just one piece of a person's story.

Review Quotes

Macios has written a lyrical depiction of a teenager discovering that there is more to her than previously established ambitions. The author's poetic background comes through when describing everything from Jenny's reaction to historical statues to whether she wants children. . . . A moving exploration of a young woman finding out what she wants for her life and her body.
--School Library Journal (starred review)

Poet Macios' YA debut, told in free verse, has a lyrical and conversational voice while delivering passages of profound and often surprising emotional depth in both Jenny's present day and her memories. . . . Balances tenderness and upheaval with striking emotional clarity.
--Kirkus Reviews

[A] very real depiction of a young person navigating grief and a loss of identity when life deviates from its original plans.
--Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

Laurin Becker Macios's verse is finely honed, vibrant and achingly real, a reflection on the ways in which travel changes and reveals us to ourselves.
--Rebecca Caprara, award-winning author of Spin

A lyrical, expansive travelogue that leads us inward. Calling Me Home captures the magnificence of place, the often-unwanted demands of the body, and the strength of one woman who deviates from her charted course to build a life of her own choosing. Relevant and beautifully poignant.
--Colby Cedar Smith, award-winning author of Call Me Athena and The Siren and the Star

'Life was only long if you were lucky, ' Laurin Becker Macios writes in her debut novel Calling Me Home. Here, luck is survival, curiosity, and the choice to keep going. Moving across Europe, Macios offers a lyric narrative of a young woman learning to trust her instincts, her body, and a world that opens and threatens at once. The book holds awe and fear together: first love, sexual awakening, vulnerability, and self-recognition, all rendered with honesty and care. What emerges is a portrait of courage shaped less by certainty than by motion, by attention. Calling Me Home is a luminous coming-of-age story that finds belonging not in arrival, but in the ongoing act of becoming.
--January Gill O'Neil, award-winning author of Glitter Road

This intensely introspective novel in verse features a strong narrative voice, romantic interludes, and poetic ruminations on life, love, and the beauty of uncharted paths that lead home.
--Booklist

About the Author

Laurin Becker Macios was born in Miami, Florida, and has since called many places home. She is the former Executive Director of Mass Poetry, former Program Director of the Poetry Society of America, and an award-winning poet for adults. Calling Me Home is her YA debut.