The word home conjures up many images - safe haven, family, food, laughter, but home can evoke past trauma and buried secrets. Author Caren Simpson McVicker's novel Henderson House involves all of those things with a dash of romance thrown in to create an engaging portrait of family, both blood and chosen.
Mrs. Henderson runs a boarding house in the quaint town of Bartlesville, Oklahoma just before the beginning of World War II. Amongst her boarders are the Blackwell family, sisters Florence, Bessie, younger brother Eddie, and Florence's young son Johnny. Florence is a widow, having lost her husband to World War I shell shock. Bessie is a spinster, a copy room manager at a prominent company in town. Eddie is a cabbie, and Florence is a clerk at the town department store. The family dreams of better opportunities and the chance to purchase their own home, but when new boarder Frank Davis moves in, he and Bessie fall instantly head over heels for one another, and for the first time the family's happiness seems doomed. Florence becomes desperate when her plans of a promotion to the Tulsa store are interrupted by Bessie's sudden romance. Both sisters have secrets that they are willing to keep for the sake of family togetherness, but keeping those secrets become less important to Bessie as she realizes her future just made may be with a man she never expected to meet.
Mrs. Henderson, owner of the house, loves her tenants like family, but feels it's time to move on. She has a romance of her own, though the plotting seems a bit rushed. Eddie is not well fleshed out and seems to serve as an echo of Johnny's reaction to one of the family secrets. Still the book is a heartwarming look at family and love.