How to Build a Heart

A heartfelt own-voices YA romance focusing on one girl's journey to find her place in a new, more affluent (and whiter) community when her family's application for Habitat for Humanity is accepted.

A Kirkus Reviews Best Young Adult Book of 2020 Family isn't something you're born into it's something you build. One young woman s journey to find her place in the world as the carefully separated strands of her life family, money, school, and love begin to overlap and tangle. All sixteen-year-old Izzy Crawford wants is to feel like she really belongs somewhere. Her father, a marine, died in Iraq six years ago, and Izzy s moved to a new town nearly every year since, far from the help of her extended family in North Carolina and Puerto Rico. When Izzy s hardworking mom moves their small family to Virginia, all her dreams start clicking into place. She likes her new school even if Izzy is careful to keep her scholarship-student status hidden from her well-to-do classmates and her new athletic and popular boyfriend. And best of all: Izzy s family has been selected by Habitat for Humanity to build and move into a brand-new house. Izzy is this close to the community and permanence she s been searching for, until all the secret pieces of her life begin to collide.How to Build a Heart is the story of Izzy s journey to find her place in the world and her discovery that the choices we make and the people we love ultimately define us and bring us home.