With a toddler and brand-new twins, Arty's family was bursting out of their house. She and her husband were desperate for *space*, somewhere their kids could be kids, maybe somewhere big enough to fit Arty's in-laws instead. They weren't really looking for a project—but oh boy did a project find them.

"Every room was strange and unpredictable. And precarious! Among the nine bathrooms we found, one large bath had clearly once been elegant, with a marble fireplace, hand-painted tiles in a shell motif, and 1940s-era wallpaper covered in swooping swallows, kingfishers, and lily pads. Another bathroom, narrow and tight, had a cast-iron clawfoot tub, but also wall-to-wall newspaper covering an enormous hole in the floor. It was like an Indiana Jones movie, some places in that house, where any step you took could make something fall on you, or swing something at you, or drop you into somewhere else." (loc. 576*)

Imagine buying a house without any real way of knowing ahead of time how many bathrooms it had, let alone how many rooms total. (The answer to the latter part of that equation: 32.) I mean, also imagine calling the 2,200-square-foot place next door a "small cottage"—while I have zero doubt that that space felt small when seven people were living there, the house I grew up in was about 1,400 square feet for five people, so I did have to laugh. If 2,200 square feet is a "small cottage", did I grow up in a shack? Or is "small cottage" only relative to 32 rooms?

But I digress. As a house renovation story (one of my favourite memoir subgenres, and yes, I know that's weird), this is charming and also a great vicarious experience. Arty's voice is strong—she worked with a ghostwriter, but this feels genuine—and she takes a balanced perspective on the desire to restore vs. the need to bring things into the modern age.

The real bonus here, though, is that Arty is also interested in the history of the house, and more generally of Black people in the area. One of the reasons she and her husband ended up with this particular house—which they stumbled across on their own—was that more than one realtor tried to limit them to less desirable houses in less desirable neighbourhoods (never mind what they could afford); she talks openly about the experience of navigating real estate while Black and then dives deep into what it would have been like to be Black in that area in the past. I'm ashamed to say that I'd either forgotten or didn't know in the first place how long it took for the "free" states to be actually free; I knew, of course, that the Fugitive Slave Act (among other things) could effectively turn free states into slave states, but not that it took New York and New Jersey about as long as the South to abolish slavery.

All of this is relevant to the book—Arty traces the history of the people who owned the house before her family, and the history of some of the people who worked there, and the slave trade is, ah, very relevant. I love that this house is in new hands, and that Arty and her family can make something new of it—preserve what should be preserved, make note of what no longer needs to be there, memorialize the people who would otherwise be forgotten, and bring new life into the house.

One thing that is missing for me, though: what do you *do* with 32 rooms? How do you even begin to fill that much space? And good golly, how do you even begin to keep it clean? I like dreaming of big houses (I live in a one-bedroom apartment), but when I think of ways to use that space that I would actually *use*, I kind of run out of ideas after "home library" and "home gym". (Maybe "second home library"...) And then I think about the fact that I need to dust my small apartment, and I get overwhelmed even by that. I guess it's just as well that I'm only living vicariously through house-restoration memoirs...

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.