★★★★☆ Complicated story complicatedly told

A House Like an Accordion

Audrey Burges

The very first sentence of Audrey Burges's A House Like an Accordion is

I was brushing my teeth when my hand disappeared

This from our first-person narrator, Keryth Miller. Keryth is startled -- myself less so. After all, I had an advantage. I, unlike Keryth, knew that she was a character in a fantasy novel. Disappearing limbs are all in a day's work. But I really sat up and took notice when, near the end of the first chapter, the following thoughts passed through Keryth's mind

Two thoughts of equal volume, equal urgency, careened through my head at the same time.
One: my father must be alive...
Two: wherever he was, however he was drawing breath, Papa must also have been drawing me.

So! Keryth knows, too.

Keryth lives with her husband Max and their two daughters Ellory and Mindy in a glass mansion on the beach in Mailbu called The House on the Waves. (By the way, each chapter of aHLaA begins with a location -- always the name of a house, and a date. Pay attention to these -- the story jumps around a lot in place and time, and you'll find it easier to follow if you know where and when you are.) You'd probably guess that a family living in a mansion on the beach in Malibu is not hurting for cash, and you'd be right -- Max and Keryth lead a Silicon Valley startup called EternAI, whose main product is Harold -- an AI emulation of Max's dead father Harold Miller.

Keryth has not had an easy life. She has no memories before the age of eight. After that she and her family moved from house to house throughout the southwestern USA. She lost her father, mother, and little brother. ("Lost" is a conveniently vague verb.) Now disappearing, Keryth goes looking for the houses in which she grew up, hoping to locate her father. We see these broken down, abandoned houses in 2016 as disappearing Keryth finds them on her search. The stories of Keryth and her family are told in flashback chapters. All of this from Keryth's first-person point of view, except that each chapter ends with a document written by someone else. These may be newspaper or magazine stories, or letters from or to a member of Keryth's extended family. These oblique insights cast essential light on the complicated story of Keryth's family.

If I have one complaint, it would be Max. Keryth's husband seems poorly thought out, little more than a caricature of a self-involved Silicon Valley billionaire. We sort of need him to explain Keryth's fabulous wealth and her two daughters, but aside from these instrumental purposes, he seemed just annoying and incomplete to me. I suspect Max (and his AI creation Harold) are meant to mirror the creative process by which Keryth's family came to be. But I wish, all the same, Burges could have made him more convincingly human.

It's a good story, not easy to follow, but worth the effort.

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