Hope House by Joe Bond follows a group of boys living in a home for delinquent youth in a small Kentucky town. Sitting somewhere between a traditional school story and prison literature, the novel is a kind of group Bildungsroman for troubled kids who have been abandoned by their families, the government, and their communities. The narrator is the one they call AWOL, his nickname referencing his unopposable instinct to run away. Self-effacing in all ways, he’ll tell the stories of his “peers” much more readily than his own. There’s Chollie who’s in the home for setting his mother’s trailer on fire; the devoutly religious Smoove who was crippled after he tried to sell vials of drywall as crack in Louisville; Karvel and Jaquan who grew up in gangs and are in constant survival mode, neither able to project themselves into a future much further than a couple hours; Peanut, who survived years of abuse from his uncle, but now wets his bed unless the boys at Hope House wake up every two hours to carry him to the bathroom.
And there’s Tony, aka Big Tone, aka Tonyboy (in reference to S.E. Hinton’s coming of age classic The Outsiders), a sixteen-year-old giant whose psychological trauma is written on his wrist scars and in his “bruised and glittering.” eyes. He’s been so mentally damaged that his anxieties and emotions can take sudden control over his body, leading to violent fits during which he has to be immobilized.
Down to the floor they wrestled him, Tony squealing and jerking, a lighting strike of purple veins branching out across his forehead…Down there on the polished tile Tony was trying to get it all out, everything trapped inside him, desperate as he was for the brief inner peace exhaustion must have brought. It would come eventually and he would shake hands and thank everybody for seeing him through, but until then he did what he always did when he was in pain. He screamed and he fought and he cried. He grinned his gap-toothed grin and held on to the ones who were holding on to him.
Tony is the physical embodiment of how the boys of Hope House experience the world. It is a raw manifestation of how their fears and needs can make them simultaneously cling to and lash out at the people who care for them. The screams, the cries, and the gap-toothed grin are all inseparable from each other.
The book ventures close to being a collection of short stories, perhaps unsurprising considering Bond was inspired to write it after his story “Damico” won the *ahem* Masters Review Short Story Award. But the book still lands comfortably on the side of a novel, as each story leads to and weaves itself into the next one.
Everybody had a story. You told the group where you were from, what you’d done, who you had back home if anyone. We called this your past history. You had to tell your past history to come off Orientation, but then you kept telling it. New peer walked in the door, you paired off with him and told him your story and he told you his.
This past history exchange isn’t just a novelistic technique to keep the book from becoming a set of solo narratives. It’s also the philosophy of the house, right or wrong, to make the boys feel responsible for each other. It works. When one of them makes a mistake or gets into trouble, the others help him get back on track. Their stories belong to them individually but also to their community.
This is reflected in AWOL’s narration. For a long stretch, the only thing we know about him is that every time he’s about to graduate from the house’s nine-month program, he runs away, sending him back to step one. Like Tony’s fits, this is another physical manifestation of the peers’ struggles. AWOL, the most bookish of the peers, knows this instinctively.
We had each other, but still there was so much to run from. We ran from our pasts but also our futures. We ran when it was time to go home and our workers couldn’t find us a placement, when stepdown programs and halfway houses filled their last opening, when our grandmothers died and our aunts and uncles had their phones shut off or otherwise lost contact. However far we made it, Watts would find us and bust us back down to Orientation––nine more months.
Even though he’s the one best known for running, the narration naturally becomes the first-person plural “we.” AWOL is ever-present in the novel, yet—as his nickname suggests—he’s trying to remove himself from it, to disappear into the community whose story he’s telling.
Still, those very interactions with his peers are often the moments when he reverts to the “I” of first-person singular narration.
In group I would listen to peers’ stories. They wanted me to tell mine too, but how could I talk about home when I’d never had one?
When I had to say something, I’d pair off with peers and lie to them. I’d tell them I had a mom. She was down in Tennessee somewhere. She was up in Ohio, trying to get herself settled. I told them I’d got a letter from her, that I had it in my drawer somewhere.
AWOL’s oscillation between “I” and “We” in the narration shows his need for community and fear of individuality. He and his peers are outcasts from a society that, despite rejecting them, still expects them to follow its rules. The peers of Hope House see their own battles in each others’ past histories and it gives them a unity that AWOL expresses every time a section is narrated by “we.” Despite their various tough acts, these boys need community and family. They’re drawn to the world that the facilitator of Hope House, Mr. Watts, has created for them. At the same time, their fear of rejection makes them run from it. They all know that, in the end, they’ll grow up and have to leave. They’ll again be alone against the world. That perhaps explains the hint of loneliness in AWOL’s narration when the “we” reverts to “I.” He ceases to be a community and becomes a boy the world has abandoned, one who believes he has nothing to offer.
The boys have to navigate a society that praises a redemption story with one breath and refuses to forgive crimes with the other. There are no easy answers to their situations; looking for a moral high ground in this novel is a doomed exercise. Joe Bond writes about these societal complications alongside the solitude that these boys experience with touching eloquence. Hope House isn’t going to provide easy answers for helping delinquent youth. It isn’t about forgiveness any more than it is about punishment. It’s about learning to see difficult people, listening to their stories, and trying to understand them. It’s too easy to forget that children who commit crimes are still children, making it all the more important to have literature that demonstrates the healing that empathy provides to those who give it as well as to those who receive it.
Publisher: Hub City Writers Project
Publication date: May 26, 2026
Reviewed by David Lewis
David Lewis’s writing has appeared in The Weird Fiction Review, Joyland, Strange Horizons, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Ancillary Review of Books, The Ghost Story, Dark Horses and others. His unpublished short story collection, Ten Little Deaths, was a finalist for the Steel Toe Books Prose Prize and the George Garrett Fiction Prize. Originally from Oklahoma, he now lives in France with his husband and dog. You can find him and links to his publications at daviddaviddavid.com.