The In-Between
by Katie Van Heidrich
Middle School    Aladdin/Simon    304 pp.
1/23    9781665920124    $18.99
e-book ed.  9781665920148    $10.99

In this memoir in verse, Van Heidrich recalls the time when her family, whose housing situation had always been precarious, experienced homelessness. Her mother moves thirteen-year-old Katie and her two younger siblings into a hotel, where they try to maintain a sense of normalcy while occupying a single room. Every other weekend, the children go from the hotel to their father and stepmother’s house, where there is more stability but also tension. School provides a haven, though Katie doesn’t share her situation with her classmates. The first-person, present-tense immediacy of the poems (“My siblings and I / are three volcanoes, / though we are not the same / in how we erupt, / let alone how often”) is complemented by the emotional distance Van Heidrich as the adult author brings to the story. Though she relates the events in the voice of a young adolescent, she also widens the perspective, allowing Katie to empathize with her parents and recognize that they are fighting their own demons. The story concludes on a hopeful but clear-eyed note: “I want to be grateful, but / I am also frustrated /and angry, / though that doesn’t feel right.” Van Heidrich doesn’t have all the answers, but she reaches an emotional inflection point that she shares with readers.

Pubissue-From the July/August 2023 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.