CALLING ME HOME
A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection
Pre-order now on bookshop.org or wherever you get your books. Out May 2026 (Holiday House).
Young Adult verse novel Calling Me Home follows a 17-year-old girl's backpacking trip across Europe—filled with awe, danger, friendships, and something like love.
Jenny Campbell, recent high school graduate, has spent her unrooted childhood planning for a future she can control: NYU, marketing major, big-city life. But first, a carefully mapped solo backpacking trip through Europe.
Only, the trip doesn’t stay on the map. As she travels between countries and memories, Jenny begins to loosen her grip on the life she’s scripted. She works at a bookshop in Greece, treks through the Balkans on overnight trains, falls in something-like-love in Rome.
At summer’s end, Jenny returns to the States ready to launch her New York City future. And then, she learns she’s pregnant. Choosing to end her pregnancy, Jenny tries to keep her plans—but finds she may no longer be the person meant to live them.
ADVANCE PRAISE & REVIEWS FOR CALLING ME HOME
“A moving exploration of a young woman finding out what she wants for her life and her body.” -Starred review, School Library Journal
“Poet Macios’ YA debut, told in free verse, has a lyrical and conversational voice while delivering passages of profound and often surprising emotional depth… Balances tenderness and upheaval with striking emotional clarity.” -Kirkus
“Laurin Becker Macios’s verse is finely honed, vibrant and achingly real, a reflection on the ways in which travel changes and reveals us to ourselves.” -Rebecca Caprara, award-winning author of Spin
“A lyrical, expansive travelogue that leads us inward. Calling Me Home captures the magnificence of place, the often-unwanted demands of the body, and the strength of one woman who deviates from her charted course to build a life of her own choosing. Relevant and beautifully poignant.” -Colby Cedar Smith, award-winning author of Call Me Athena and The Siren and the Star
“Life was only long if you were lucky,” Laurin Becker Macios writes in her debut novel Calling Me Home. Here, luck is survival, curiosity, and the choice to keep going. Moving across Europe, Macios offers a lyric narrative of a young woman learning to trust her instincts, her body, and a world that opens and threatens at once. The book holds awe and fear together: first love, sexual awakening, vulnerability, and self-recognition, all rendered with honesty and care. What emerges is a portrait of courage shaped less by certainty than by motion, by attention. Calling Me Home is a luminous coming-of-age story that finds belonging not in arrival, but in the ongoing act of becoming. -January Gill O'Neil, award-winning author of Glitter Road
SOMEWHERE TO GO
WINNER OF THE 19TH ANNUAL POETRY AWARD FROM ELIXIR PRESS
Temporarily out of stock
“Rilke wrote, ‘The only journey is the one within.’ Macios takes her readers on such a journey—one of quiet contemplation, depth, and deftly-rendered emotion—in Somewhere to Go. Her chief obsession is longing, which carries us—in life (if we are lucky) and as Macios guides us in these poems—in a kind of inverted narrative arc of love to death to love again.” —Liz Robbins, author of Freaked (Elixir Press)
“‘Ever wonder when you’ll be satisfied?’ asks Laurin Becker Macios in her captivating debut collection Somewhere to Go. Her poems are fearless in examining the internal and external landscapes of memory, place, marriage, and self. By sketching these moments, she creates a portrait of a life that travels beyond the page. With a voice that is authentic and direct, these poems are meditative, intimate, and full of guile. This is a wonderful and wondrous first collection. —January Gill O'Neil, author of Rewilding (CavanKerry Press)
I ALMOST WAS ANIMAL
WINNER OF THE 2018 WRITER’S RELIEF WATERSEDGE POETRY CHAPBOOK CONTEST
Available here
"The poems in I Almost Was Animal court mystery without sacrificing clarity, each short lyric encompassing leaps that stretch us but don’t let us drop. They hold the capacity for joy and love but also loss, the emotions contained within the tight craft of the lines, stanzas, and lyrical prose poems. Images return—tulip, ocean, wing, girl—and comment on each other, so that we feel that we’ve been wrapped in a tapestry, almost a narrative. The poet calls on Arnaut Daniel, Walt Whitman, George Herbert, and César Vallejo, poetic ancestors who are very unlike each other, though each is engaged in the exploration of his own wildness, in language chosen for its precision. That balance between wildness and discipline is what constitutes the beauty of this collection, which richly deserves to find a wider audience." —Susanna Lang, author of Travel Notes from the River Styx