Second Chances, Growth and Tenderness in “Hope House” https://ift.tt/SVz5WK2
“At Hope, we were capable of cruelty, of pettiness and bullying,” Joe Bond writes in Hope House, his debut novel, “but also we believed it when Watts told us that our lives were in each other’s hands.” True to this insight, Bond’s noveldoes not fixate on the worst of its characters’ transgressions but rather on what they can now make of themselves and of each other — given home, given hope. Hope House paints a beautiful, humane portrait of masculinity that is as tender as it is profane.
Set in 1980s Louisville, Hope House interrogates boyhood through the lens of the city’s most forsaken, a group home for delinquent boys. The novel features an ensemble cast of youths with names and nicknames as vibrant as Tonyboy Malopelli, Karvel McLemore, Smoove, and the narrator, AWOL, as well as their caretakers, most prominently the group home’s embattled director, Mr. Watts. Through these characters, Bond introduces us to a community where growth is the expectation, where communication is the tool attempting to make that expectation a reality. Told with grace, humor, and — rare for a story about so-called delinquent boys — tenderness and care, Hope House is a thoroughly human novel that teaches us “how family forms in a void.”
Bond’s narration is something of a magic trick, a gradual reveal of the voice at its center through those in his periphery. We’re introduced to our narrator on the very first page, a boy nicknamed AWOL for his penchant for running away from the program. AWOL, however, quickly recedes into the novel’s background. He’s more interested in telling us the stories of his peers, as if he were the Greek chorus narrating this tragedy. Stories, both real and mythologized, are how these boys know one another. As AWOL says, “You had to tell your past history to come off Orientation, but then you kept telling it.” Bond divides his novel into the five phases of the group home’s program — Orientation, Learning, Improving, Progress, and Graduation — with Intake and Aftercare serving as the novel’s prologue and epilogue, respectively. These phases, however, become a vicious cycle, with boys repeatedly arriving, leaving, and returning to the home.
The titular Hope House operates within its own set of unique and vibrant rules. The stakes faced are high, not just for the boys but also for the home. “There weren’t many homes like ours left,” AWOL narrates. “We’d heard about the others closing, peers being sent to the camps. We didn’t want to go to camp — we were trying to stay open.” The camps are harsher, more populous, and one step closer to prison. And so, the home’s fate becomes an existential threat for both its inhabitants and its caretakers, one predicated on their relationship with a city which, at best, ignores them and, at worse, fears them. At Hope, however, they are together. Their director, Mr. Watts, leads them group counseling sessions and takes them out into the community to work and to compete in the occasional basketball tourney.
It’s the boys’ individual stories that give Hope House its juice. Bond packs an array of character arcs into the novel. One of the most affecting involves the tragic figure of Karvel. Because of Bond’s non-linear narrative, we meet Karvel as the boy who leads others at the “head of the table” long before we see, in a memorable sequence, the Karvel so reluctant to take part in the home’s routines that the other boys have to chariot him to community service by dragging him and his bed out the door.
Peers moved his bunk outside, and Karvel, not to be outdone, got back in it. That was the morning the group carried him down the hill in the cold. He had to be freezing. He was in his boxer shorts, thinking he was winning by holding out, but it was hard to see him lying there under his cover while the rest of us cut our hands open clearing brush and hauling wood to the woodpile.
Through Karvel, Bond portrays the possibilities, both optimistic and realistic, of what a home like Hope can provide for its boys. In the home, Karvel evolves into the charismatic leader introduced to us early on, but outside the home, the progress he makes cannot, unfortunately, overcome the absence of opportunities for boys like him.
As the novel progresses, it becomes clear why Mr. Watts invests so much of himself into the home and in cases like Karvel. In an essay in The Paris Review, Bond reveals that he based the novel on his experiences growing up with a father who built and directed group homes. How much of Bond’s father is written into Mr. Watts is answerable only by Bond himself; nonetheless, the richness of Watts’ characterization adds to the novel’s spirit of resilience. As an instructor who has worked with many an all-boys class, I found myself taken not only by Mr. Watt’s aspirations but mostly, in the reflection of a man who makes many missteps and mistakes. Education and rehabilitation, perhaps, requires not only that we see ourselves in those whose tutelage is our responsibility, but also that those we work with see themselves in us. AWOL captures this collapsing of distance between director and ward when he catches Mr. Watts arguing with one of the long-standing members of the home’s staff: “I saw how young [Mr. Watts] was, and it startled me. He almost looked like a kid. He almost looked like one of us.” This kind of empathy helps make the novel as compelling as it is. Bond forces us to see ourselves in these delinquent boys living on the outskirts of Louisville.
Of course, none of this would work without a narrator whose growth we find ourselves rooting for. For all his running away and reticence, the sharp and insightful AWOL becomes as invested in the humanity of his peers as he is in his own. Cynicism would have been the easy route, but what Bond offers is more layered and resonant; he takes hope, “whatever you are when you’re not alone anymore,” at its word. In Hope House, Bond offers us a glimpse of the redemptive aspects of rehabilitation — that we can truly hold each other up and hold each other accountable and be better off for it. And that a second, third, or even fourth chance is as simple as a change of shirt and a home in which to run — a home where your tribe awaits, ready to greet you “in a void.”
FICTION Hope House By Joe Bond Hub City Press Published May 26, 2026
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