On the surface, Keryth Miller seems to have a pretty good life. She and her husband, Max, are the founders and owners of a successful tech company with ambitions to model AI after deceased loved ones. She has two teenaged daughters, a comfortable house and enough money to, well, do pretty much anything she wants to. That last bit of luxury is going to come in quite handy in this story since she will need a lot of money in order to fund her new pet project. But more on that in a bit.
You see, Keryth's picture perfect life has some issues. For one, she and Max aren't in the best of places. They have grown apart over the years and while they both run the company, Max has been taking more of a lead. Keryth feels like their relationship will soon result in a divorce, and she isn't quite sure if that's a bad thing or not. Keryth's daughters are starting to grow distant, but she's pretty sure that is normal teenage stuff and nothing too unexpected. Unfortunately, these somewhat mundane events aren't the biggest issue our protagonist is facing. It seems she is disappearing, quite literally. Her hand is simply invisible. She can still hold things and use it, but it is completely transparent. After quickly donning a pair of gloves, Keryth realizes that there is something wrong and it must be tied to her father and her family's secret power.
Keryth learned at a young age that her father had an incredible talent for drawing. Not only was his art wonderfully detailed, it was almost life-like. She soon learned that "almost" was the wrong word. If he wanted to, he could draw something and make it real, but he also knew that he should never draw anything that was real because doing so would trap it in his pages forever. It wasn't long after learning this particular piece of her father's abilities that Keryth learned she also had this talent. With an effort and a lot of practice, Keryth could "nudge reality." With Keryth's suddenly disappearing hand, she realizes two things. One is that her father is apparently not dead and the other is that he has broken his rule about not drawing from life since she is clearly getting pulled into one of his pages.
Keryth becomes determined to track down her father and figure out what is happening. Unfortunately, she doesn't really know where to find him. Keryth became an orphan in high school during a tragic event that lost both her brother and her father (or so she thought) and her mother had been out of the picture for a while by that time. She doesn't exactly know how to track down her father after all this time, but she suspects she needs to work backwards and visit all of the strange homes she lived in during her childhood.
Keryth's youth wasn't really a normal one. For reasons she doesn't quite understand, her family moved a lot. It seems that after only a few months, Keryth's mother and father would get spooked and decide to suddenly up and move, each time into a new house her father had drawn. Now, all these years later, she feels she needs to revisit them if she is going to track down her father and learn why he is drawing her.
While Keryth only has vague memories of her earlier houses, she knows exactly where to start and that's the last of her father's houses in the town where she went to high school, the very place where her brother drowned and where she officially became an orphan. Instead of opening up to her family and showing them her missing hand though, Keryth decides to declare that she is starting up a "special project" and has decided to track down all her old homes and buy them up. While her husband, daughters and Harold (the robotic version of Max's father) all seem surprised by this new venture, they let her have at it without too much of a fuss, at first anyway.
As this story progresses, Keryth meets up with her best friends from high school, Erma and Tobias. Erma is a local real estate agent who Keryth ends up hiring to track down and find her father's older homes, while Tobias is a contractor and when he starts poking around at Keryth's old residences, he starts to ask some questions that Keryth isn't ready to answer.
A House Like An Accordion weaves together the story of Keryth's hunt for her family with the story of her growing up. As Keryth works her way to older and older houses, young Keryth progresses in the opposite direction and we learn of the many strange events that surround Keryth, her parents, and her Gran (her father's mother). It seems the ability to "nudge reality" is a bit of a family trait, but even with that knowledge, it is clear that there are some deeper secrets under the surface of Keryth's memories.
I absolutely enjoyed A House Like An Accordion. I like the idea of making one small concession to the fantastical, in this case Keryth's family power to draw things into reality, and explore how the world and characters behave because of it. Don't get me wrong, I love bigger magic systems with complex rules (or even softer magic systems with fewer rules), but this kind of deep dive into a single bit of magic is great. A House Like An Accordion is more a story about the people in it and how they deal with this bit of magic more than the magic itself. If this sounds intriguing to you, do yourself a favor and check it out.
