Coming Home

The teenage boys of Hope House, Joe Bond’s debut novel, are walking contradictions. They’re tough but vulnerable, violent but tender. They seek to understand their brittle existence by sharing their life stories, but “nobody’s story came out all at once or even the same way twice.”

So says AWOL, the narrator, who adds, “We were liars, but most of the lies we told were to ourselves.”

He’s called AWOL because he runs away so much. The peers, as they’re called, tend to run. Never mind that in the fictional Hope House of 1980s Kentucky, they finally have a semblance of a family, of a home. They have hope.

Yet they’re forever finding reasons to flee — often without understanding why and despite the inevitability of their return.

There’s a word for this contradictory nature.

Human.

The boys of Hope House are human in all the usual complex, complicated, and contradictory ways. And some of the more unusual ones. They use deceit as a coping mechanism, and they suffer silently rather than seek comfort — as we all sometimes do. But everything about their lives has been more dire, more severe, than should be “normal.” Of course they react in extreme ways, usually to their great detriment.

That will draw you in as a reader, but it’s something else that will make you really care: The Hope House boys may be delinquents and criminals — as they sometimes call themselves — but they’re not caricatures, sketches, stock characters. They’re fully fledged. They’re real boys with beating hearts beneath all those scars. They have dignity.

If he’d written this story another way, Bond might be fielding offers for the broadcast rights — a dark comedy about delinquency, streaming soon on Hulu.

A piece of entertainment.

The book Bond has written feels more like memoir.

In a way, it is. Bond told an interviewer in 2019 that his father ran a group home and other programs for teenagers. “I was just always around, especially when I was a kid. I’d sit in on group counseling; I’d listen to their stories. If the boys were going camping or cave exploring, I’d cram myself onto a van and go with them.”

Bond tells this fictional version of life in a treatment home with a reporter’s eye, a counselor’s heart, and a peer’s knowing. He cares about these kids and what becomes of them. But he presents them with what feels like unflinching honesty.

There’s Bobby Church, barefoot and covered with mud when the state police dropped him at Hope House. Later we learn that he “ran over his dad with a truck,” that his dad raised him on crime and he’s scared of his old man.

There’s Tonyboy, considered crazy by the peers and who says of himself, “I’m nuts.” Sometimes it shows itself in small ways, as when he’s “laughing at something the dog had said.” (The dog’s name: Cujo.) But Tony could be violent — or as he says, “I’m easily angered.”

And there’s AWOL, who tries many times over the course of the book to explain their running:

We ran two days before Christmas, the day after Thanksgiving, and Sundays when no one came to visit.

And:

We ran off from day treatment, basketball tournaments, and fishing trips. We ran off from church — every head bowed, every eye closed.

And:

We ran when we realized we weren’t free, that there was something other than walls between us and the world. We ran when we remembered where we were and where we weren’t but also when an opportunity arose, when staff left their car keys in their jackets, their jackets draped over the desk chair in the hall. Every so often our legs took off on their own — we were running before we realized it.

Back at Hope House after these failed escapes, they had to start over again in the five-phase program. They had to again wear the yellow shirt of the Orientation phase. It was demoralizing. But then again, they were home, back with that semblance of a family. They had shelter, structure, and that elusive something called hope.