The Family Home Book One: Practice Makes Perfect

Nell Vance has a system. When her parents fight downstairs, she can't read a word of her case law, so she shuts herself in the bathroom and empties her head the only way that has ever worked. The best study aid she owns cost thirty-four dollars and lives in a shoebox under her bed.One night her mother opens the bathroom door at the worst possible moment.

Nell is too far gone to stop. Her mother watches for three seconds, says nothing, and pulls the door shut. She isn't angry.Nell measures everything.

What she felt with her mother in that doorway is a result she didn't expect, and one reading proves nothing, so she means to test it.By the next afternoon she's at Slate Run, the Renner farm at the end of four miles of dirt road, for a month with the family that raised her mother: her grandfather Emmett, her aunt Adrienne, and the three cousins she's known all her life. Her mother sent her there for a reason, and everyone on the farm seems to know it except Nell.