Like Home - (Like Family) by Michele M Feeney (Paperback)

About the Book

During the Great Depression in rural Michigan, a schoolteacher, her husband, and their adopted daughter face hardship, illness, and questions of identity. Determined to support their community, they must find the strength to endure and thrive.

Book Synopsis

Mollie Crowley Reid, a schoolteacher, lives in rural Michigan with her husband, Tom, a store owner and farmer, and their adopted daughter, Cecilia, an art student. In the depths of the Great Depression, Mollie receives unexpected news that impacts the future of her family and makes the threats to their economic well-being even more daunting.

Facing these new challenges, Mollie fights to maintain her beloved career, her home, her health, and her family, all the while reaching out to help those around her as best she can. Cecilia, orphaned during the influenza epidemic of 1918, seeks connection with her biological family and her identity as a student and artist. Tom, with sometimes crushing responsibility, fights to maintain his livelihood and mental health, make sense of turbulent politics, and extend compassion and assistance in his community.

Through trials of illness, financial hardship, unsettling times, and family displacement, they discover home is not a place but rather the people who choose to love and support each other through life's unexpected turns. And family, they learn, is built on shared struggles and love.

Review Quotes

"This book about motherhood, family, and what it means to call a place home will stay with me a very long time." -Lee Martin, author of the Pulitzer Prize Finalist, The Bright Forever and The Evening Shades

"Like Home is a thrilling novel that brings history vividly to life." -Susan Cheever, author of When All the Men Wore Hats: Susan Cheever on the Stories of John Cheever

"Like Home, Michele M. Feeney's sequel to her first novel, is a wonderful and deeply moving rendering of the plight of poor Midwest families during the Depression. I read it eagerly and was sorry to see it end!" -Lynne Sharon Schwartz, author of A Stranger Comes to Town

"Michele M. Feeney is clearly becoming America's own Elizabeth Jane Howard." -Ann Hood, author of The Stolen Child

"Tender, empathetic, and wise, this follow-up to Feeney's Like Family is a gift." -Tara Ison, author of At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf

"Like Home is a beautifully rendered and transportive historical novel that forces us to reckon with our obligations to those who suffer even when we, ourselves, are suffering." -Lauren Francis-Sharma, author of Casualties of Truth

"The magic of historical fiction happens when we stop being an observer of history and become a participant. Author Michele Feeney performs this magic deftly. Without our even realizing it, Feeney weaves her words and draws us away from today and deep into the early 1930s in Emmett, Michigan." -Kathie Giorgio, author of Hope Always Rises