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WORK TITLE: The House No One Sees
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WEBSITE: https://adinakingauthor.com/
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COUNTRY: United States
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Female.
EDUCATION:Vermont College of Fine Arts, M.F.A. (writing for children and young adults).
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Middle school and high school English teacher.
AVOCATIONS:Roller derby, dogsledding, mountains, gourmet food.
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PERIODICALS
BookPage, April 2025, Mariel Fechik, review of The House No One Sees, p. 27.
Kirkus Reviews, January 15, 2025, review of The House No One Sees.
School Library Journal, March 2025, Allie Stevens, review of The House No One Sees, p. 87.
ONLINE
Adina King homepage, https://adinakingauthor.com/ (August 10, 2025).
Macmillan Children’s Publishing, https://www.mackidsschoolandlibrary.com/ (February 3, 2025), “MacKids Spotlight: Adina King.”
School Library Journal, https://www.slj.com/ (April 16, 2025), “Author Adina King on YA Debut ‘The House No One Sees.’”
Adina King is veteran English teacher from Maine. Aside from teaching high school and middle school, she has worked in book stores, played roller derby, and dabbled in dogsledding. She received her MFA in writing for children and young adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she studied with A.M. Jenkins, A.S. King, Shelley Tanaka, and Martha Brockenbrough. When she isn’t writing or covered in dirt from Olympic yard work, her natural habitat includes one or more of the following: roller skates, dogs, mountains, chickadees, music, and really excellent food.
Adina longs for the day book censorship is no longer a thing. As a good friend and mentor once told her: “A good story is always going to piss someone off.”
Author Adina King on YA Debut ‘The House No One Sees’ | 5 Questions and a Rec
by SLJ Reviews
Apr 16, 2025 | Filed in News & Features
0
Photo of Adina King, cover of The House No One Sees, and the 5 Questions and a Rec logo
In this Q&A series, SLJ poses five questions and a request for a book recommendation to a debut YA author. Adina King shares about The House No One Sees in this latest installment.
1. Congrats on your YA debut! How would you describe your book to readers?
Thank you! The House No One Sees is a contemporary YA with surrealist elements written in alternating prose and verse. It is the story of Penelope Ross, a girl who must walk through her past to save her present. Forced to confront her mother’s opioid addiction to mend her fractured story, Penny wanders between present and past—prose and verse—unsure if her childhood home is guiding her out or leading her further into its memory maze. I picture House like a Matryoshka doll—you know, one those carved Russian dolls that nest one inside the other. There is light outside, but there is also a light inside, and as Penny walks through herself to find herself, she isn’t sure she has the courage to free this light. The idea for this book started with rage but ended with love. It is not an easy read, but it is a necessary read.
2. What drew you to YA to tell this story?
There is nothing like the YA genre. It’s gritty, honest to a fault, and that makes it necessary. Because this is the world in which teens live. This is why books are so important. Books open doors to difficult conversations and show us we aren’t alone. Maybe this is one of the reasons so many books are being banned from middle school and high school libraries. They portray realities that often feel too real to discuss. Imagine how that makes young people feel. Penelope Ross would not have made it to the end of this book without someone fighting to provide her with an equitable and inclusive education. This is why I chose the YA genre.
3. What, if anything, surprised you while writing it?
The fact that I had to marathon write Penny’s story in order to protect my own mental health. This meant I could only work when I had time to sprint from exposition to conclusion. It was difficult to walk in Penny’s shoes. In Maine, about 40 percent of young people report having lived with an adult struggling with alcohol or drugs. That’s eight out of twenty of my students. Really, picture that. How many young people like Penelope are sitting in your classroom—in your library? It was this overwhelm that surprised me. It was intense, though not completely unexpected.
4. Tell us more about the characters. Which character do you most identify with and why?
The house, though I guess I didn’t identify as much as connect with it. Houses are shelter. Houses are memories. Houses can be places to hide. When the house spoke, I knew its voice; and when the house came to life, it was both familiar and strange. Because of this, the parallel between the structure of the house and Penny’s emotional arc made me walk through some of my own parallels—a journey that further connected me to both Penelope and the house.
5. What do you hope readers will take away from this book?
Books have been compared to many things, but for me they are like houses. A good book has attics and basements, maybe some cobwebs. A good book has closets and cupboards, and maybe a yard that pisses off the neighbors. But the best book is one in which you find a space that feels like yours. I hope my readers take what they need and leave behind what they don’t. There are many ways to feel like a house no one sees, but there is always light. It’s okay to walk through yourself to find yourself. It’s okay if it’s messy. Keep going. Be the light.
The Rec: Finally, we love YA and recommendations—what’s your favorite YA book you've read recently?
I’ve been revisiting books that give me hope. I know it is does not technically fit the YA genre, but I just re-read The House of the Cerulean Sea, a book with characters who always fill my cup. The joy, the hope, the love—TJ Klune’s book is everything our world needs right now. Many of my teen students also love this book. I think it may be one of those special reads that has outgrown its genre label.
MacKids Spotlight: Adina King
February 3, 2025
This month’s Author Spotlight is Adina King, author of The House No One Sees, an evocative young adult novel written in verse and prose that follows a teen girl and her memories of her childhood, her house, and her mother who battles an opioid addiction.
Can you tell us about what inspired The House No One Sees? Where did the idea first come from?
Adina King: This is a long and complicated answer, one I may never completely master.
The House No One Sees started as rage poetry after I stumbled across a news article about a former student who’d died from an overdose. It had been years since I’d seen her, but that didn’t change the connection we’d had. And what does a writer do when she goes into emotional overwhelm? She writes. Then, about a week later, I was stopped at a traffic light staring at a house on a corner. I’d sat at that intersection more times than I could count, but this was the first time I’d noticed the house, its windows cracked, paint peeling, perched too close to the road. Something about that house started a reel of rolling memories. The first memory was me as an outcast kid, then me as an angry and reckless teen, then me as a young adult struggling to find the parts of myself that I’d misplaced. But then a parallel reel began to run in which I remembered a friend in the early 90s talking about her mom’s “hillbilly heroin”, then there was the death of one friend, then another, and another… another. As these parallels drew closer I realized I hadn’t completely understood what addiction had done to my friends, to their families, until I started teaching their kids.
The idea for this book started with rage but it ended with love.
In this book, you weave between verse and prose, moving between Penny’s present day journey through her childhood home and her kaleidoscopic memories from her past. Can you tell us more about why you chose to craft the story in this way, alternating between these two narrative forms? And, what was the writing process like, switching between these two styles?
Adina: Imagine what it’s like to be a kid who lives in two incredibly contradictory settings. Imagine if those settings are school and home. Now imagine the clever and creative mind of a child—how they see things through an often timeless and surrealist lens. I think this is why it took an impossible number of drafts to get this book to where it is. And since my emotions were heightened, poetry was a natural starting point.
At first the book was pure poetry, but the poems were kind of all over the place voice-wise. The story needed a structure they’d fit within, which is when I added the house as a larger metaphor. It takes an average of 1 to 3 hours to die from an opioid overdose, and this is the amount of time Penelope is in the house. But there was still something missing, and that something was Penelope’s reality. This is where the prose came in. Prose allowed me to craft parallel timelines that would show Penny’s path to healing. When the poems finally caught up to the prose at the end, Penelope had discovered her way out, allowing the surreal to join the tangible.
The House No One Sees is your debut! What has been the most exciting, or surprising, part so far about being a debut author?
Adina: The fact that it’s an actual book. There is nothing like holding that first copy. Growing up, my family didn’t have a lot of money, but every Sunday my parents would take me on an expedition to the bookstore. There has always been something about books—about the opening of their covers, the smell of those new pages—it brings me back to that bookstore filled with stories, with possibilities. Holding that first tangible copy gave me a strange, magical feeling.
What was the first book that made you fall in love with reading?
Adina: Books have been compared to many things, but for me they are like houses. A good book has attics and basements, maybe some cobwebs. A good book is going to have closets and cupboards, and maybe a yard that pisses off some of the neighbors. But the best book is one in which you find a space that feels like yours. Beverly Cleary did this for me. She created imperfect, messy female characters who felt real. Characters who felt envy and made impulsive choices. Characters who got in trouble, felt shame, but in the end knew they were still loved.
How do you hope The House No One Sees will be used in classrooms and libraries? What do you hope young readers will take away from this book?
Adina: In Maine, about forty percent of young people report having lived with an adult struggling with alcohol or drugs. That’s eight out of twenty students. So for me this book was inevitable. In freeing Penny, I freed myself to normalize conversations about addiction. And I know it’s hard, but the only way to reach young people is through our own vulnerability and shared empathy. I hope this book starts dialogues, builds bridges, and creates connections. It is only through illuminating addiction’s widespread impact that we will chase away the shame that prevents healing.
As for my readers, I hope they take what they need and leave behind what they don’t. There are many ways to feel like a house no one sees, but there is always light. It’s okay to walk through yourself to find yourself. It’s okay if it’s messy. Keep going.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adina King is a Maine girl through and through. She received her MFA in writing for children and young adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts, a magical realm where she met her second family. When she isn’t writing or covered in dirt from Olympic yard work, she can either be found hanging out in her classroom with amazing humans, or wandering the forest and talking to inanimate objects. Her natural habitat includes one or more of the following: roller skates, big dogs, mountains, chickadees, and really excellent food. She longs for the day book censorship is no longer a thing.
King, Adina THE HOUSE NO ONE SEES Feiwel & Friends (Teen None) $19.99 3, 18 ISBN: 9781250337191
Penelope Ross' mother struggles with opioid addiction.
On the night of Penny's 16th birthday, a desperate text from her estranged mother draws her back to the house they once shared. There, Penny, who presents white, is forced to confront buried trauma and painful memories. Through verse and prose that veer into the surreal, debut author King shows Penny revisiting a childhood in which she was left to fend for herself. Penny likens her mother to Sleeping Beauty; referencing a needle mark on her mother's foot, she thinks, "This must be where the spindle entered. The one that turned you into The Sleeper." She recalls the growing suspicions of adults who knew something was amiss and frequent visitor Seth--"He had dark hair and blue eyes that came / after me when you weren't looking"--who died of an overdose in their home. Eventually, Penny's mother enters rehab and her maternal grandparents take her in, beginning a cycle of painful separations. Life with Nana and Grandpa provides her with structure, physical care, and emotional nurturing as well as therapy. Meanwhile, life with her mother is marked by hunger, neglect, and chaos. The shifting narrative creates an intentional sense of uncertainty. Penny's childhood memories are conveyed through a childlike voice that's filled with longing for her mother and the blissful early days before addiction took hold. This heartbreaking work will resonate deeply with fans of A.S. King and Amber McBride.
Raw, gripping, and heart-wrenching. (content note, resources)(Verse fiction. 14-18)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"King, Adina: THE HOUSE NO ONE SEES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A823102424/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=04a19f5d. Accessed 17 June 2025.
By Adina King
Once upon a time, there was a little doll who lived in a house perched on the corner of a busy street with bright lights. The road was so busy and the lights so bright that no one could see the house. The doll lived with a princess who slept and slept and almost never woke up. The doll tried to wake the sleeping princess, but once the princess opened her eyes, she called the little doll terrible names. The little doll ran away and found a new version of home. But some part of her remained, buried deep in the foundation of the house that no one saw.
The doll is really Penelope Ross, a 16-year-old girl contending with a childhood spent in the trenches of her mother's drug addiction. On the night of her 16th birthday, surrounded by friends, Penny is finally feeling a sense of normalcy--until the sleeping princess sends a text, summoning her back home.
Adina King's debut novel, The House No One Sees (Feiwel & Friends, 19.99, 9781250337191), depicts a young person who has built a labyrinth of trauma and grief and must subsequently learn the art of both deconstructing and reconstructing her life. Written in a hybrid of verse and prose, Penny's story comes in nonlinear pieces. In the present, Penny navigates her way through the house and a flood of memories, while the details of her past are filtered through poems. Though King's metaphors occasionally become muddled, this figurative exploration of the effects of parental drug addiction is brilliant. After all, trauma and its aftermath is not usually a legible experience: It exists in the margins of a life, coloring everything contained in between. The House No One Sees is not a perfect book, but it is an important one that might offer a guiding light to countless other little dolls.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
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MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Fechik, Mariel. "The House No One Sees." BookPage, Apr. 2025, p. 27. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A832405061/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=09037621. Accessed 17 June 2025.
* KING, Adina. The House No One Sees. 304p. Feiwel & Friends. Mar. 2025. Tr $19.99. ISBN 9781250337191.
Gr 8 Up-No one ever saw Penny's old house, the one on the corner that's blue outside and red inside and so tired of keeping its secrets. No one seems to see Penny either, which is convenient when late on the night of her 16th birthday, an urgent message from her estranged mother pulls Penny away from her crush and her friends and back to the house. Knowing but not wanting to acknowledge what she might find, Penny must reckon with the house's tendency to distort time and reality in a surrealistic labyrinth of memory and perspective. As the prose present twines with the past in verse, Penny retraces her childhood and examines her mother's addiction and the havoc it has wrought in Penny's own life. As she begins to come to terms with the reality of her mother's decisions and the consequences for both of them, she must walk through her own memories to arrive in the present, beginning to realize along the way that she is more than the empty vessel of her invisible house on the corner. Shifting narrative styles highlight the ways that Penny's mother's addiction defined her whole childhood; verse sections from the past are sweetly (painfully) naive, while prose present-tense Penny is more world-weary and aware. A gut-wrenching and powerful kaleidoscope of a story; for fans of A.S. King, Ellen Hopkins, and Kathleen Glasgow.--Allie Stevens
KEY: * Excellent in relation to other titles on the same subject or in the same genre. BL Bilingual | S Streaming
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
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MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Stevens, Allie. "KING, Adina. The House No One Sees." School Library Journal, vol. 71, no. 3, Mar. 2025, p. 87. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A836878385/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=13454d34. Accessed 17 June 2025.