Calling Me Home

Macios has written a lyrical depiction of a teenager discovering that there is more to her than previously established ambitions. The author’s poetic background comes through when describing everything from Jenny’s reaction to historical statues to whether she wants children. . . . A moving exploration of a young woman finding out what she wants for her life and her body.
—School Library Journal (starred review)

Laurin Becker Macios’s verse is finely honed, vibrant and achingly real, a reflection on the ways in which travel changes and reveals us to ourselves.
—Rebecca Caprara, award-winning author of Spin

A lyrical, expansive travelogue that leads us inward. Calling Me Home captures the magnificence of place, the often-unwanted demands of the body, and the strength of one woman who deviates from her charted course to build a life of her own choosing. Relevant and beautifully poignant.
—Colby Cedar Smith, award-winning author of Call Me Athena and The Siren and the Star

‘Life was only long if you were lucky,’ Laurin Becker Macios writes in her debut novel Calling Me Home. Here, luck is survival, curiosity, and the choice to keep going. Moving across Europe, Macios offers a lyric narrative of a young woman learning to trust her instincts, her body, and a world that opens and threatens at once. The book holds awe and fear together: first love, sexual awakening, vulnerability, and self-recognition, all rendered with honesty and care. What emerges is a portrait of courage shaped less by certainty than by motion, by attention. Calling Me Home is a luminous coming-of-age story that finds belonging not in arrival, but in the ongoing act of becoming.
—January Gill O’Neil, award-winning author of Glitter Road

Poet Macios’ YA debut, told in free verse, has a lyrical and conversational voice while delivering passages of profound and often surprising emotional depth in both Jenny’s present day and her memories. . . . Balances tenderness and upheaval with striking emotional clarity.
—Kirkus Reviews