Unless you are fascinated by the real estate market, houses, architecture, floor plans, renovations, do-it-yourself home improvements and decor; this book is not for you. I happen to be obsessed by all of these topics, so I enjoyed this book. ( )

As a member of the recently lamented “slow-to-grow-up” generation of young adults, Meghan Daum has spent her fair share of years living in spare rooms, shared apartments, and rented spaces. But unlike some of her generation, she longs to settle down with property and a house, and so spends the better part of two hundred pages chronicling her journey. At first, Daum is a sympathetic narrator — she describes her childhood games of playing house, pretending to live a frontier life like Laura Ingalls Wilder, and her parents longing to live in in New York, going so far as to claim to be from NYC despite living twenty miles away in New Jersey. When she goes away to college, choosing Vassar in the hopes of finding the means after graduation to a “shabby yet elegant prewar apartment in Manhattan,” she spends her time dorm-hopping or planning her next move. Astonishingly, after graduation, she manages to, with two of her friends, find said apartment; over the next five years, she goes through seven roommates, and finally “as I grew older and the roommate turnover rate grew higher , the place felt less like a source of emotional and aesthetic ballast than a crash pad I’d mistaken for a permanent resident. Worse, as my cohabitants became younger, my ‘senior roommate’ status began to feel less like a mark of distinction than a big-city version of being a college student who can’t bring himself to graduate even though he’s approaching thirty.” This flowery and dramatic language continues throughout the rest of the narrative, including Daum’s on-again off-again flirtation with the idea of a farm in Nebraska, subletting a condo in Hollywood from a despised woman whose faults include too many cats and candles, her despair over the housing market, and her desperation to appear as an independent, worldly woman who owns a home.

Although the book begins well, Daum’s pathos and constant equating her self with her prospects of home ownership grates after a few chapters. By the end, when she has finally purchased a home and is negotiating sharing the space with her new boyfriend, readers will be exhausted as she continues to moon over other houses and will be glad to get to the pat “home is where the heart is” conclusion. There is plenty to be said about the search for home, about today’s young adults and their delayed settlement into a house, but this book wanders and wonders too much to significantly address these topics. ( )

I continue to love Meghan. This is Daum #3 for me, and while I feel it's a bit weaker, and definitely less weighty, than THE UNSPEAKABLE or THE PROBLEM WITH EVERYTHING, it's still worthwhile. One part about her boyfriend's attachment to a couch that is too big for her house which he's about to move into was so funny I read it out loud to my husband. He cracked up, and said that if you just threw in a few references to European philosophers, it could have been Woody Allen. I hope she'd take that as a compliment.

I feel I share Meghan's real estate fetish, although she's taken it to lengths I would never have dared. The sentence in the book that gave me that "Meghan has hijacked my brain again" feeling was:

"[W]ith a few exceptions, I think it's fair to say that I've never visited a place without imagining myself permanently or at least semipermanently installed there."

I never knew if this was something that everyone feels to some extent, or if it was just me. Maybe it's just me & Meghan.

I KNOW I share her fixation on "Little House" and all things farmy and prairie. I rage with jealousy that she actually did move to a farm in Nebraska for a period of time. Just hearing her mention the words "Lincoln, Nebraska" fills me with longing. I think only she would understand. ( )

I recently read an article that questioned the current trend of everyone penning a memoir. This book, to me, exemplified said trend. A memoir about real estate? I picked it up for the clever title, which now strikes me as the best thing about the book. It would have made a delightful magazine article. There were amusing passages, to be sure, and Daum is a competent writer but there's not enough here, or too much.

The author's endless fascination with her own reactions to parquet and hexagonal tiles was about as interesting as watching paint dry. A life less ordinary, it's not. There were enough interesting characters to keep me from tossing it back in the library bag unfinished, but I can't recommend it unless you have a deep and abiding interest in real estate. Which I have found I do not.

( )

I have to admit, there were a few times upon first starting Meghan Daum's journey through cross-country real estate where I wanted to put it down. The writing style reminded me a bit of "Eat, Pray, Love", which I really didn't like. However, I am certainly glad that I stuck around to see it through, and I found myself waking up at 6:30 this morning to finish the last 20 pages.

Meghan Daum's choice to focus on her real estate obsession was a solid one. Without this anchor, I would have probably placed it in the "anxious writer has writer's block and needed to come out with something, so they wrote about their neuroses" category, hence my rush to compare it to "Eat, Pray, Love." (I think I am neurotic about trying not to pick up a book like that again.) But Meghan Daum's clear and unabashed writing style became more enjoyable as the story progressed.

I believe that there is a transitory time in anyone's life where they should read this book. I could identify with her desire to pick up and move just after moving all of her furniture into a new place. It certainly would appeal to anyone who is facing a cross-country move, a new job, or any other life-changing moment that you wish you could erase. ( )