For anyone who grew up knowing the family story had missing pages, this is a Golden Crown Award shortlisted novel about a ten-year-old girl learning to write her own.
It's East Los Angeles, 1967. Duffy Chavez is ten years old, and the youngest in a houseful of half-siblings, kept together by a single mother and not much else. As other girls at school move through the world like they know their place in it, Duffy watches from the kerb, working out the rules as she goes.
But no-one will answer her straight, about the space in the family where her own story should be. As the truth begins to surface in pieces, Duffy learns that knowing where you come from is not the same as knowing who you are... so she may just have to work the second one out for herself.
Told with uncompromising clarity through Duffy's eyes, A House of Light and Stone is at once smaller and larger than it looks: childhood unfolding in the space between one girl's questions.
---
For readers who return to Harper Lee, Sandra Cisneros and J.D. Salinger for the unflinching moral gravity of a young narrator's perspective. This is a novel that refuses melodrama and earns its emotional weight rooted in the specific textures of the margins of a shifting America. Runyon writes with the grounded patience of a storyteller who trusts their reader, and their young narrator, in equal measure.
A story about identity, inheritance, and what a ten-year-old can see that the adults around her cannot.
