How to Build a House
Written by Dana Reinhardt
Narrated by Caitlin Greer
4/5
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Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this audiobook
Soon she's living in a funky motel and working long days in blazing heat with a group of kids from all over the country. At the site, she works alongside Teddy, the son of the family for whom they are building the house. Their partnership turns into a summer romance, complete with power tools. Learning to trust and love Teddy isn't easy for Harper, but it's the first step toward finding her way back home.
From the Hardcover edition.
Dana Reinhardt
Dana Reinhardt lives in San Francisco with her husband and their two daughters. She is the award-winning author of the young adult novels A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life, Harmless, How to Build a House, The Things a Brother Knows, and The Summer I Learned to Fly and the middle-grade novel Odessa Again. Her books have been named to many best of the year lists, and reviewers have praised her work as “exceptional,” and “funny and unforgettable.” Visit her at danareinhardt.net.
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Reviews for How to Build a House
97 ratings12 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Harper's mother died when Harper was very young. Her father remarried, and Jane was the only mother she ever really knew. Tess was not only her stepsister, but her best friend as well. When Jane and her father divorced, Harper felt she was losing Tess as well. To get away for the summer, she joined a project in Tennessee to build a house for a family displaced by a tornado.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I loved this book. I was drawn to Harper from the first page. She cares deeply about things and truly wants to make a difference. And then as the book proceeds you find out that she has some secrets. Things happened back home that made her want to get away. Somehow her life unraveled. As Harper narrates the summer in present-tense, she flips back and forth between explaining what happened with her family in California. She gives you just enough information to pull the reader forward through the story and keep you intrigued.It's a quiet book. The big, dramatic events have happened offstage - the tornado and the divorce. Harper's dealing with the aftermath of both. Far away from her home, she makes new friends and discovers a true connection with a boy. Slowly, she begins to put everything back together.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Harper's mother died when Harper was very young. Her father remarried, and Jane was the only mother she ever really knew. Tess was not only her stepsister, but her best friend as well. When Jane and her father divorced, Harper felt she was losing Tess as well. To get away for the summer, she joined a project in Tennessee to build a house for a family displaced by a tornado.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I loved this story. The chapters alternate between Here (Harper with other teen volunteers helping to build a house for a family whose home was destroyed by a tornado) and Home (where Harper slowly fills in the story of her life and her family) It is hard not to take Harper into your heart.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Well written and a unique plot.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5How to Build a House is an exceptionally compelling and well-written book that was full of drama, romance, and the struggles of a teen’s life. Harper, a thoroughly believable and exceptionally resilient teenager decides to join a teen volunteer program that helps rebuild houses for families who have lost everything because of horribly destructive natural disasters, like tornadoes. There, Harper meets a wonderful crowd of people: Captain, Frances, Linus, Marisol, and Teddy. Soon her relationship with Teddy develops to be something much more than a friendship; could it be love? The scars of her previous “relationships” deeply haunt her, but love seizes her anyway with its firm and undeniable grasp, only to leave her breathless and head over heels. But, while an innocent summer romance blossoms like a beautiful red rose, the memories of her once warm and comforting home life still resonate painfully in the back of her mind like a single gunshot; back at home, her family has been ripped apart. Adultery, lies, depression, and longing flood Harper’s home life to the very brim until the water pours out freely, just like the tears that she had cried many a night. Thus, as Harper falls in love, deals with the drama at home, and tries to mend the lives of others, she must glue together the smashed pieces of her life. I loved this book so much for many reasons. First of all, I loved how Reinhardt parallels the construction of a house with the reconstruction of a shattered family by using the “HOME” and “HERE” partitions of the book. It gives you a whole new perspective on how Harper was thinking, and what happened. Not to mention the fact that it frequently left me on the edge of my seat! I also enjoyed the fact that Reinhardt concocted amazingly believable and enjoyable characters, like Harper, who was put in real-life situations and forced to handle them in the inscrutable way that she would. The way in which Reinhardt described the past events and memories of Harper’s life and the events that were just occurring utterly amazed me. Everything was so intricate, detailed, and well-thought out, it stunned me! The way in which she molded and shaped her careful words like a meticulous sculptor was consummate. In my opinion, this book was positively fabulous. I loved the author, characters, plot, and thought provoking, gut-grabbing situations that appeared in this excellent book. I would recommend it to anyone looking for an enthralling novel to devour, or anyone who enjoys realistic fiction and romance. This story was an absolute grand slam. Not only was this book about a summer love and a broken family, it was about rebuilding things; rebuilding homes, families, people, and . . . lives.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Build a House was a wonderful read. Harper's story is realistic and understandable and heart-breaking and inspiring, all at once. Since her father and step-mother's divorce, Harper is just lost. The gap between her and Tess, her former step-sister/best friend, keeps widening and she doesn't know why. She starts a casual sexual relationship with a friend, which ends up leaving her more hurt than before.Harper's escape comes in the form of a volunteer program for teens, similar to Habitat for Humanity. She's going to spend her summer in Tennessee, building a home for a family that lost theirs in a tornado. While learning how to build a house, Harper learns how to rebuild her life. Between her new friends and Teddy, her new love interest who happens to be part of the family that will live in her house, Harper manages to heal herself and forgive the people in her life.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Harper's dad and stepmom are in the midst of divorce. The problem is that Jane is the only mother she's ever known because her mom died when she was two. Reinhardt does a wonderful job of explaining today's blended families as Harper struggles with losing her sister Tess (who was actually her stepsister . . . and best friend) in the divorce. As summer approaches she knows that she needs to get away from all that has happened throughout the school year and signs up for a program called Homes from the Heart, which helps people rebuild after a natural disaster. Harper goes to Tennessee hoping to sort out all of her problems and confusing relationships over the twelve week separation. The distance is good for her and as the book progresses the reader watches as Harper helps reconstruct a house and make sense out of her life. The novel is told in sections labeled "Here" (Tennessee) and "Home" (flashbacks to LA and the life she left behind). Harper left LA to avoid relationships and the complications that come with them, but alas, she finds herself wound up in a summer romance. How to Build a House has its sweet moments of young romance and the first taste of independence, but it also illustrates the agony of divorce, especially the feeling of guilt that Harper and Tess feel about loving one family and the fear that it makes them disloyal to the other. I would recommend this to book to older teens that enjoy honest fiction about real issues.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Harper Evans' family is falling apart. Her parents are divorcing, and she is losing not only her beloved step mother, but also her stepsister and best friend. Seventeen-year-old Harper flees the scene of her emotional devastation and flies across the country to face the very physical destruction of another family's Tennessee home. As Harper spends her summer learning 'how to build a house,' she also learns a lot about herself in the process, and about what true love and family relationships are made of. Harper becomes involved with Teddy, the boy whose home is being rebuilt. In Teddy's family, Harper sees all that she longs for, and fears she has lost, in her own. As she spends the summer making new friends and developing talents she never knew she had, Harper gains confidence and a true sense of accomplishment. She returns home ready to put the same effort toward rebuilding her relationship with Tess. Reinhardt's characters and their situations are real - readers will relate to and appreciate them.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Harper, a high school teenage girl, volunteers to fly to Tennessee to help build a house for a family who lost their home in a tornado. She decides to spend her summer doing this because her dad and stepmother have divorced, and she's having a hard time dealing with the fallout. She and her stepsister, Tess, were the best of friends, and now there's an awkwardness between them that is hard to bridge, especially when Tess started fooling around with Gabriel, who was Harper's semi-boyfriend. While in Tennessee, Harper meets Teddy, the son of the family they're building the house for, and they fall in love, in spite of all the emotional baggage she's carrying with her. Due to the sexual content, I chose to pass this book along to my local high school, even though it was a simple story, and the sex was not detailed.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Harper decides to spend her summer before senior year building a house for a family who survived a tornado, but really wants to escape her life at home. The story takes place here (small town Tennessee) and home (Los Angeles) while Harper shares her summer and the problems in her life with the reader. Harper and her friends are the type of characters that I find myself wishing were my friends in real life. The plot flows smoothly throughout the book and transitions between here and home are easy and make sense. I really enjoyed this audiobook and think this would be a great addition to any teen colleciton.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dana Reinhardt is emerging as one of my favorite YA authors. She does, indeed, write "girl books", but a good book is a good book and to my mind she writes very good books. She has a way of making you very much care about her characters without leaving you feeling manipulated.