I am grateful to BookBrowse and to Berkeley Publishing Group for giving me an advanced reader's copy of a fabulous new book by first time novelist Colleen Hubbard entitled Housebreaking. The book is scheduled for publication in April 2O22. I enjoyed it immensely, despite …more the fact that few of it's characters have many redeeming qualities.

The protagonist is a young, headstrong, teenage girl who's parents have died and who has few friends except for the gay male friends of her late father. The only surviving family she has is her late mother's brother and his 3 sons, all of whom she detests, and his wife, whom she barely tolerates. She drifts from job to job and has no assets, until she learns that her mother's dilapidated, old house, in which she grew up and that which she inherited, is the only obstacle to her uncle's plan to subdivide the land upon which it sits and build a housing complex. To spite her uncle , she proposes to accept less money for the house in exchange for a small piece of land that isn't buildable and time to demolish the house herself.

She immediately sets to work dismantling the house piece by piece and dragging the pieces across a frozen pond to her newly acquired patch of land. Although she prefers solitude and rejects most people with whom she is forced to interact during this time, she finds that she has made a genuine friend in the end. (less)