The Road Home

It occurred to Eliza Thomas when she hit her forties that home might be "someplace you made." A modest cabin in the woods of Vermont seemed like a good place to start. Thomas's funny, heartwarming experiences transform the weekend cabin into a real home--a place where Thomas paints the floor the same color as her grandmother's beach house porch; where hordes of ladybugs come to visit one Indian summer; and the place her adopted baby daughter excitedly recognizes as they make their way through the woods in a snowstorm. In writing that is at once funny and poignant, Eliza Thomas welcomes us into the warm and cozy rooms of her first real home. "A charming memoir . . . Thomas details the joys and problems of rural living."--Publishers Weekly; "Pleasant to read, funny at times, candid and poignant at others . . . by the end of the book, Thomas accomplishes a remodeled future built by hand, and a sense of her life as a narrative leading home."--The New York Times Book Review; "Another back-to-nature/independent woman story? Hardly. Which is what makes Thomas's memoir, THE ROAD HOME, all the more enjoyable. . . . She conveys a very real, living definition of home."--The Boston Globe. A BOOK-OF-THE-MONTH CLUB and QUALITY PAPERBACK BOOK CLUB selection.

When author Eliza Thomas realizes suddenly, in her forties, that she has forgotten to make a life or a home, she thinks it's time to find an alternative to her leaky, drafty apartment in Boston. After a few trips to the country, she finds an old Boy Scout cabin in a small valley in Vermont. At first Thomas's one-room cabin doesn't seem like a place where she could live year-round - even with the cabinets and bunk beds that the previous owners added. It's just somewhere to go on the weekends for some peace and quiet. But with Yankee ingenuity and a good sense of humor, Thomas sets about turning this tiny, eccentric structure into something closer to home. She clears the land, builds two additions - the first to accommodate her grand piano and bed, the second to make room for her newly adopted Chinese daughter, Amelia - and she plants a garden. In the midst of all the construction, the mice, and the unexpected disasters, Thomas explores neighboring woods and farmland, rescues a puppy named Freddy, and with much imagination and a few stops at local yard sales, makes her quirky place livable.