A Way Home by Emily Brewin

Title: A Way Home

Author: Emily Brewin

Genre: Contemporary

Publisher: Midnight Sun Publishing

Published: 15^th April 2024

Format: Paperback

Pages: 224

Price: $19.99

Synopsis: Sixteen-year-old Grace lives under a bridge in Melbourne’s CBD. It’s cold and wet, but hidden. Safe, at least, until she can go home.

When winter drives her to the City Library one morning, Grace meets Louie, a weird kid with his own problems, and discovers a community piano. The piano reminds Grace of her mum, a celebrated pianist whose mental illness makes life a rollercoaster — and not always a fun one.

When Grace comes up with a plan to find the help she and Mum need, life begins to look up. But things don’t work out as Grace imagines and suddenly her world’s turned upside down again, and maybe for good this time.

A Way Home is a big-hearted novel that explores the complexities of growing up with a parent who is struggling, and about the places and people we call home.

~*~

Grace has spent the past few months living under a bridge in Melbourne’s CBD – ever since her mum got sick again and was taken to hospital. Grace is alone, after spending years ping ponging between her mother and grandparents, whenever her mother’s mental illness has made things like a rollercoaster.

This time, she’s made her own choices, and she’s safe. Cold and wet, but safe. Then winter drives her into the warmth of the City Library, where she discovers a community piano that unlocks memories of her mother, and these memories push Grace to find out more about her father. The man whom she has been told about but never met. Who lives halfway across the world and is also a concerto pianist.

Grace also meets people who help her. Louie, with his own secrets, and Kate the librarian, and someone that Grace feels she can depend on. Grace’s plan feels foolproof – until it falls apart, and Grace doesn’t know where home is anymore.

A Way Home is a complex novel full of heart that touches on homelessness, mental health, single parenthood and the communities we create for ourselves, whether on purpose or through circumstance. Grave’s story is touching and evocative, showing what happens to make people homeless, and serves as a reminder that it can happen to anyone, and that everyone in those circumstances deals with it differently. The exploration of homelessness through Grace’s experience examines how everyone is affected differently, and how people who are homeless face judgement from society, but there is also a sense of hope – the people who help Grace, who buy her food, and who help her find a way to earn money and open up. For me, it was the presence of Louie and Kate, who helped Grace that showed that there are people who don’t judge, who try to help and understand amidst all the ones who will judge and ignore people like Grace. This aspect was key to how Grace was able to work out what she was going to get help and move on, so she could live her life safely.

And it is Grace’s mother’s struggles with mental illness that informs Grace’s journey as well, and her connection to music. For Grace, music helps her heal, and she wants to use it to help her mother. To ease her mother’s pain and remind her of the beautiful talent and skills they both have with the piano. Emily Brewin has managed to capture a way of experiencing mental health through Liesel, Grace’s mother, and how it affects the people around her, how Grace responds to it and at times, tries to hide from it, but when she also tries to confront it and find a way cope with it and to help her mother. And by focusing on the reality of ow mental health affects people, showing that things don’t always work out how we want, that life is unpredictable as well. It’s about personal cost and what it takes to make that first step to ask for help. Finding the strength to ask for help was something that Grace had to learn to do, and to build up to across the book.

A Way Home gives a voice to those society often ignores and averts its gaze from, reflecting on how easily tragedy can befall anyone at any time. When it does this, it reminds us of how vulnerable we all are, and that there are things that happen in this world that many of us never have to face, but in this book, a lot of it is front and centre, thrust into being with a hopeful despondency that highlights that everyone has good and bad things in our lives. I think most importantly, there’s a sense of hope in this book that I got through the presence of music, books, the library and Kate, because these were the things that Grace was able to hold onto for her stability. It shows that we all grasp onto things to maintain a sense of stability in our lives as well.

Above all, I feel like this is a book about hope. Hope that things are going to work out in the end, hope that things will change, and hope that life will be what we want to make it  – even if we have to stumble along the way to get there.