You’d Be Home Now is a story that revolves around Emory, the youngest of a rich family in the tight-knit community of Mill Haven. Emory’s always considered herself as and been the “good one,” her brother Joey the “rebellious one,” and her sister Maddie the pretty but successful one (she got accepted to a prestigious university). (Emory and Joey are high schoolers.) Emory’s life, and Joey’s too for that matter, falls apart when she gets in a car with herself, her brother, her brother’s friend Luther, and a girl named Candy MontClaire –and Luther crashes the car. It’s discovered that Joey was high on drugs (namely oxytocin), and Emory’s mother immediately sends him off to a rehab center. Luther is imprisoned for dealing drugs, and Candy dies from the accident. As for Emory, who has sustained some injuries from the car crash herself, she returns home under the care of Maddie and her mother, the latter of whom refuses her access to enough pain medication because of what happened with Joey and his drug addiction.
This in turn heightens Emory’s feeling that she is being neglected and not noticed by her parents. Her father and mother are a doctor and a lawyer, respectively, and her father, while caring, works the majority of the time in the emergency room operating on patients, while her mother always keeps busy and seems distant. Throughout the book, Emory discusses numerous times how she has always been considered the “good one” who doesn’t cause any trouble and how this, rather than leading to much reward, has instead led her to feel invisible. This, as a result, leads her to seek some form of validation, if you will, or recognition from someone else, and have an inappropriate relationship with Gage, a star high school baseball player next door, in which she’s basically taken advantage of and/or allows herself to be taken advantage of. More specifically, in her desperation to be valued and noticed, she agrees to have intimate moments with Gage in her pool house despite him expressing that he doesn’t desire a formal, public relationship during which they go on dates, while this is normal and something that Emory does desire. Emory also agrees to Gage taking inappropriate photos of her with his phone because the recognition she feels from Gage doing such a thing overpowers the initial hesitation she feels from agreeing to him taking said pictures.
While all of these conflicts are going on with Emory, Joey, while having initial success with recovering from his drug addiction, experiences many challenges and downfalls with his drug use. High school peers, such as one of Candy’s dance friends, go up to him during one of the school dances and entirely blame him for the death of Candy, which in turn causes him to relapse, amongst other such obstacles to his recovery. Joey also experiences a lot of tension in the relationship he has with his mother, who imposes draconian measures in a harsh attempt to hopefully counteract his drug use.
With You’d Be Home Now, it was particularly nice to see the character development. Emory’s mother and father grew more aware of a need for change in the parenting of their children and shifted their attitudes about drug addiction and those who suffer from it in a positive way. More specifically, while they (mostly Emory’s mother) had previously scorned the drug addicts who lived under the bridges of the town, they decided to assist in the opening of a rehab center for them at the end of the story. Emory grew more confident in herself and formed new bonds/friendships. The book was very wholesome in this sense.
Joey’s drug addiction struggle culminates in him disappearing after his friend Luther, who has now gotten out of jail, comes to his work and passes him a packet of drugs. Joey, who is feeling stressed at the time, impulsively decides to take the drugs, which, in one event after another, eventually leads him to become missing from his family for a couple of weeks. Emory desperately begins to do whatever she can to help find her brother, and SPOILER ALERT* in fact does end up getting him back by the end of the story. You’d Be Home Now is really a story read less for its plot than the elaborately and well-crafted tales of its characters and their experiences as they struggle over time.
You’d Be Home Now also explores a very wide array of topics ranging from plays, to as written above, drug addiction. Emory somewhat finds solace in taking drama at her school, where she reconnects with her former friend Lisa and grows closer with a classmate named Jeremy. The book even explores socioeconomic issues to a certain extent, as it shows how Emory’s mother was initially going to just dedicate a large portion of land to condo builders who would entice more people to move into the town and in turn benefit the town’s economy but then opened her eyes to the issue of the poor and drug-addiction-afflicted people who were living in dilapidated conditions in the town and decided to build the drug rehab center instead.
Personally, I’m not sure how accurately this book portrays drug addiction recovery and its challenges, but it seemed pretty accurate on a surface level. Sometimes, I wasn’t sure if Emory’s ways of dealing with her feeling of not being recognized by her parents were a bit of a stretch, such as her proclivity for stealing things such as valuable pens and jewelry without paying for them, but I could see why she might have done something like she did with Gage in response, which ended up being her main conflict in the book.
In conclusion, You’d Be Home Now is a bit of an emotional read and journey, but it’s a great book that you will likely not regret trying. It definitely takes its own spin on the main issues that it’s about, and it will keep you hooked. Enjoy!
Review by ~ Andrew
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