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    Three Story House: A Novel
    Three Story House: A Novel
    Three Story House: A Novel
    Ebook427 pages8 hours

    Three Story House: A Novel

    By Courtney Miller Santo

    3/5

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    About this ebook

    Renovating an historic Memphis house together, three cousins discover that their spectacular failures in love, career, and family provide the foundation for their future happiness in this warm and poignant novel from the author of The Roots of the Olive Tree that is reminiscent of The Postmistress, The Secret Life of Bees, and Kristin Hannah’s novels.

    Nearing thirty and trying to avoid the inescapable fact that they have failed to live up to everyone’s expectations and their own aspirations, cousins and childhood best friends Lizzie, Elyse, and Isobel seek respite in an oddly-shaped, three-story house that sits on a bluff sixty feet above the Mississippi.

    As they work to restore the almost condemned house, each woman faces uncomfortable truths about their own failings. Lizzie seeks answers to a long-held family secret about her father in her grandmother’s jumble of mementos and the home’s hidden spaces. Elyse’s obsession with an old flame leads her to a harrowing mistake that threatens to destroy her sister’s wedding, and Isobel’s quest for celebrity tempts her to betray confidences in ways that would irreparably damage her two cousins.

    Told in three parts from the perspective of each of the women, this sharply observed account of the restoration of a house built out of spite, but filled with memories of love is also an account of friendship and how relying on each other’s insights and strengths provides the women a way to get what they need instead of what they want.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateAug 19, 2014
    ISBN9780062130563
    Three Story House: A Novel
    Author

    Courtney Miller Santo

    Courtney Miller Santo teaches creative writing to college students and lives in Memphis with her husband, two children, and retired racing greyhound.

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    Reviews for Three Story House

    3/5

    6 ratings8 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I loved The Roots of the Olive Tree and was hoping this one would be equally as good. While the Three Story House had a good story, it didn't come anywhere near the previous book. The characters did not feel as developed as they should have been and there were too many lose ends at the end. A good read but not one of my favorites.
    • 3/5
      Thirty and none of them where they want to be in life, the three cousins – Lizzie, Elyse and Isobel – decide to move in together and to restore Lizzie’s family’s crumbling home in Memphis. As they deal with what life heaps on them, and with the help of each other, the Elizabeths gradually grow into their own strengths. The Three Story House is written with each girl’s story as one part of the whole house. Like a glass of southern sweet tea, maybe just a tad too sweet, but what a nice thing to have with you on the beach.
    • 4/5
      A good summer novel, above chick lit, this is a story of three female cousins who hit the career and personal life skids simultaneously and decide to renovate a collapsing family house in Memphis. It's a "Spite House", build on an odd lot due to inheritance disputes. Lizzie, Elyse, and Isobel each have some secrets and mysteries in their families which have shaped them, and dumb mistakes they make as a result. But their travails are amusing and within the realm of possibility, and each character has their own distinct quirks which make for a smooth read.
    • 2/5
      I loved the concept of this book. Three adult cousins come together to save one of their grandma's old houses from being condemned. Over the course of the year they all confront their various problems. Lizzie, a star soccer player, is benched after she tears her ACL and is desperately trying to go through rehab and be better in time to try and make the Olympic team. She's also struggling with the fact that she is 28 and still has no idea who her real father is. The only reason she agreed to try and save the house was to try and get some leverage on her overly religious mother and stepfather. Isobel, a former child star and struggling actress, is trying to figure out what she wants to do with her life. As the youngest in her family she craves attention, but is it what she really wants? Elyse is falling apart at the seams. Her younger sister is marrying the man she's in love with and she just can't cope. Together these three cousins share up and downs as they come together to save the weird, three story, spite house and they find themselves changing in ways they never could have imagined. Like I said, cool concept but... I still didn't really love any of the characters. I was more intrigued with the house to be honest. Not a bad read, but not one that will stay with you. Good for the beach though.
    • 3/5
      Three Story House is the story of three cousins who are closer than sisters. Each is stumbling through her own life on her way to an uncertain destination. First, there is Lizzie, professional soccer player and would-be Olympian, but another knee injury has threatened to sideline her for good. Then there is Elyse, whose bold aspirations accumulate a mountain of failures. Lastly, there is Isobel, a has-been sitcom actress whose true self, if she could find it, might be wrapped up in restoring houses. When Lizzie discovers that her grandmother's oddly shaped Memphis mansion has been condemned and is in danger of being sold at auction, the three cousins drop everything and head to Memphis to see if the house can be rescued and whether it holds the answers to all of Lizzie's questions about her missing father.All in all, I was disappointed with Three Story House. I loved the idea of the three women finding healing for themselves while restoring a house to its former glory, but the execution was a little bumpy. Don't get me wrong, there's absolutely nothing wrong with Santo's writing. It flows well, does a good job of describing the house the three cousins are trying to save, and Santo puts a good effort into drawing out her three protagonists. The problem is, I didn't particularly like them or dislike them or feel much of anything for them at all. They wavered between seeming less than genuine and making me feel weirdly uncomfortable, neither of which is great when it comes to relating to characters. Lizzie was almost too vulnerable, crumbling at the least provocation. Too much of the cousins' bond seems to revolve around protecting overly fragile Lizzie from the difficult stuff life has to dish out. The heart of Elyse's storyline was so desperate and selfish that I was mostly embarrassed for her. Isobel alternates between being the strong and supportive ring leader to being staggeringly self-centered, and I felt that Santo struggled to get at the heart of her character.I'm okay with an ending that leaves some matters unresolved, but Three Story House seemed like it wanted to tie everything up, but finished with a lot of ends that were still pretty loose. Instead of giving Elyse and Isobel proper endings for their story lines, Santo allows the end of the story to meander back to tying up Lizzie's loose ends leaving the other cousins' stories to peter out unsatisfactorily. Three Story House touches on some big themes but doesn't dig quite deep enough to fully unearth them, leaving the book marooned in the uncertain territory between fluffy women's fiction and something a little more profound.
    • 3/5
      If you haven't heard of spite houses before, go look them up because they are fascinating. If you have heard of them, you're probably intrigued by them like I am. The stories behind these houses are wild and so very, very human. They tell of neighbors who hate each other or families who cannot get along. They are a giant middle finger, revenge for something unforgivable. One such house is the thing that functions exactly opposite the way that it might have, bringing cousins together, helping them work through the crises in their lives that are weighing them down, and helping them find happy, productive futures.The Memphis house that Lizzie lived in until she was eight, before her mother married her stepfather, is a spite house. Several years after her grandmother's death, she and her mother could lose the house to condemnation if they don't restore the derelict building and bring it up to code but her mother's out of the country on a mission trip so it's up to Lizzie. Lizzie doesn't want to upend her life to save it, especially given her contentious relationship with her mother, but since she's recovering from a horrible knee injury, one that could cost her her dream of Olympic gold and a her professional soccer career, she agrees to check things out. Once back in Memphis, faced with the overwhelming task, she makes the decision to rescue the house, determined to save it from demolition by the city. She is joined by her two step-cousins, Elyse and Isobel, who are each facing growing pains of their own. Elyse was blindsided when her sister and her childhood best friend, who she's been in love with forever, announced their engagement and Isobel, a former child star, cannot capture the fame and celebrity she craves as an adult. So all three women are on the precipice (almost literally, given the house's location) of change, whether they want it or not.Spite House is both three stories tall and literally a house of three stories, those of Lizzie, Elyse, and Isobel. Each woman's story is told in turn in the three sections of the novel. The house holds secrets and answers but it is only the backdrop to the renovation, reinvention, and restoration the characters must do in their own lives; it's a project to keep them moving forward and to help them embrace their futures, significantly changed from what they once envisioned. Lizzie is the strongest of the characters and the mystery of her father's identity is another big plot line here. Given the structure of the novel, Lizzie's story, followed by Elyse's story, and finally by Isobel's story, Santo has done a good job keeping all of the stories going, one in the foreground with two in the background at any given moment. The resolutions to everything might be a little bit easy but over all, this was a satisfying, readable family drama.*Note that although this was supposed to be an Early Reviewer book for me, I never did receive a copy of it and ended up getting my own copy.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed the story of THREE STORY HOUSE, the renovation of a "Spite House" in Memphis. The three cousins help get the house back to code for the one cousins parents and the troubles along the way and of the past. I liked this storyline better then CMS's first book, Roots of an Olive Tree, the book was a little choppy but that didn't diminish the family saga that made the ending come together.
    • 4/5
      While I enjoyed Three Story House very much, I think I preferred Santo's debut novel, Roots of the Olive tree better. This novel followed the lives of cousins Lizzie, Elyse and Isobel, as they renovated Lizzie's grandmother's house back to code. At times, I thought cousins Lizzie, Elyse and Isobel were too hard on themselves, so I liked the breakdown of the sections more devoted to each of the young women and their feelings, and how everything came together to create the whole story. I particularly liked the inclusion by Santo of a prequel of sorts of the beginning of this particular Spite House. I almost think it would have made as good a prologue as the beginning that introduced us to the new cousins as girls.

    Book preview

    Three Story House - Courtney Miller Santo

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