MacKids Spotlight: Adina King

MacKids Spotlight: Adina King

This month’s Author Spotlight is Adina King, author of The House No One Sees, an evocative young adult novel written in verse and prose that follows a teen girl and her memories of her childhood, her house, and her mother who battles an opioid addiction.

Adina King: This is a long and complicated answer, one I may never completely master.

The House No One Sees started as rage poetry after I stumbled across a news article about a former student who’d died from an overdose. It had been years since I’d seen her, but that didn’t change the connection we’d had. And what does a writer do when she goes into emotional overwhelm? She writes. Then, about a week later, I was stopped at a traffic light staring at a house on a corner. I’d sat at that intersection more times than I could count, but this was the first time I’d noticed the house, its windows cracked, paint peeling, perched too close to the road. Something about that house started a reel of rolling memories. The first memory was me as an outcast kid, then me as an angry and reckless teen, then me as a young adult struggling to find the parts of myself that I’d misplaced. But then a parallel reel began to run in which I remembered a friend in the early 90s talking about her mom’s “hillbilly heroin”, then there was the death of one friend, then another, and another… another. As these parallels drew closer I realized I hadn’t completely understood what addiction had done to my friends, to their families, until I started teaching their kids.

The idea for this book started with rage but it ended with love.

Adina: Imagine what it’s like to be a kid who lives in two incredibly contradictory settings. Imagine if those settings are school and home. Now imagine the clever and creative mind of a child—how they see things through an often timeless and surrealist lens. I think this is why it took an impossible number of drafts to get this book to where it is. And since my emotions were heightened, poetry was a natural starting point.

At first the book was pure poetry, but the poems were kind of all over the place voice-wise. The story needed a structure they’d fit within, which is when I added the house as a larger metaphor. It takes an average of 1 to 3 hours to die from an opioid overdose, and this is the amount of time Penelope is in the house. But there was still something missing, and that something was Penelope’s reality. This is where the prose came in. Prose allowed me to craft parallel timelines that would show Penny’s path to healing. When the poems finally caught up to the prose at the end, Penelope had discovered her way out, allowing the surreal to join the tangible.

Adina: The fact that it’s an actual book. There is nothing like holding that first copy. Growing up, my family didn’t have a lot of money, but every Sunday my parents would take me on an expedition to the bookstore. There has always been something about books—about the opening of their covers, the smell of those new pages—it brings me back to that bookstore filled with stories, with possibilities. Holding that first tangible copy gave me a strange, magical feeling.

Adina: Books have been compared to many things, but for me they are like houses. A good book has attics and basements, maybe some cobwebs. A good book is going to have closets and cupboards, and maybe a yard that pisses off some of the neighbors. But the best book is one in which you find a space that feels like yours. Beverly Cleary did this for me. She created imperfect, messy female characters who felt real. Characters who felt envy and made impulsive choices. Characters who got in trouble, felt shame, but in the end knew they were still loved. 

Adina: In Maine, about forty percent of young people report having lived with an adult struggling with alcohol or drugs. That’s eight out of twenty students. So for me this book was inevitable. In freeing Penny, I freed myself to normalize conversations about addiction. And I know it’s hard, but the only way to reach young people is through our own vulnerability and shared empathy. I hope this book starts dialogues, builds bridges, and creates connections. It is only through illuminating addiction’s widespread impact that we will chase away the shame that prevents healing.

As for my readers, I hope they take what they need and leave behind what they don’t. There are many ways to feel like a house no one sees, but there is always light. It’s okay to walk through yourself to find yourself. It’s okay if it’s messy. Keep going.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adina King is a Maine girl through and through. She received her MFA in writing for children and young adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts, a magical realm where she met her second family. When she isn’t writing or covered in dirt from Olympic yard work, she can either be found hanging out in her classroom with amazing humans, or wandering the forest and talking to inanimate objects. Her natural habitat includes one or more of the following: roller skates, big dogs, mountains, chickadees, and really excellent food. She longs for the day book censorship is no longer a thing.


ABOUT THE BOOK

The House No One Sees
by Adina King
Ages 14-18

A gripping and evocative young adult novel written in verse and prose that follows a teen girl and her memories of her childhood, her house, and her mother who battles an opioid addiction.

Penelope Ross has always felt like a passenger in her mother’s fairytale—until the night of her 17th birthday, when she is forced to enter her own.

After a text from her estranged mother rips her away from a night with friends, Penny is forced into a kaleidoscope of memories locked inside the dark labyrinth of her childhood home. As Penny wanders between present and past—prose and verse—she must confront her mother’s opioid addiction to mend her fractured past. But the house is tricky. The house is impossible. It wants her to dig up the dead to escape. And as Penny walks through herself to find herself, she is not sure she has the courage to free the light she trapped inside.


★ “Through verse and prose that veer into the surreal, debut author King shows Penny revisiting a childhood in which she was left to fend for herself . . . This heartbreaking work will resonate deeply with fans of A.S. King and Amber McBride. Raw, gripping, and heart-wrenching.”—Kirkus ReviewsSTARRED REVIEW

“[A] spellbindingly surreal, fairy tale–infused debut . . . Penny’s quiet growth from “the house no one sees” to becoming a teen with agency and a future . . . casts a dizzying, dazzling spell.”—Publishers Weekly


Read more author Q&As here