At the same time, Minda is offered a job in Washington state, where the cost of living is much lower than in the Bay Area, and she is strongly considering moving there with Lou. Making this worse is the fact that the family is having trouble coming up with the money necessary to pay taxes on the piece of land Lou’s dad left them. But even after she gets her degree, jobs are hard to come by. Minda has been putting in long hours in her job and then getting her nursing degree at night in order to start earning more money.
She enlists the help of her friends and cousins, learns what she doesn’t already know from YouTube videos, and also gets to know Annie, the woman who runs the local salvage shop and who helps Lou source materials. Keller, Lou decides to solve the problem of overcrowding in her grandma’s house by building a tiny house – 100 square feet in total – for her mom and herself on her dad’s piece of land. Taking the skills that she has been learning in her school’s woodshop class from her helpful teacher Mr. But that’s not the only thing Lou feels she inherited from her dad – he also left her with his love of architecture, her eye for visual detail, and her incredible talent for creating with her hands. When he died, he left Minda and Lou a small parcel of undeveloped land. Lou is biracial, and grew up without knowing her white father, who died a few months before she was born. For Lou, all this really means is that normal has become her “gigantic extended family squished into Lola’s for every holiday imaginable,” and it’s true that the novel is set against a background of her family’s preparations for the Filipino festival honoring “bayanihan,” or community. Ever since Lou’s grandfather died a few years ago, the family has had a tough time financially. Although she loves being so close to her relatives, she is also starting to feel cramped in her grandmother Lola Celina’s small home, where Lou has to share a bedroom with her mother Minda.
Twelve-year-old Lucinda Bulosan-Nelson, who prefers the nickname Lou, is growing up in the midst of a large Filipino family in San Francisco. At the same time, readers applaud Respicio’s ability to honestly address issues like the displacement and outsider-feelings that biracial kids often experience without lessening the book’s upbeat and warm tone. The novel is rich in details of Filipino culture, including words in Tagalog, descriptions of customs like the birdlike Tinikling dance and eating kamayan style (with one’s hands). Drawing on her own heritage, Respicio tells the story of an adolescent girl who attempts to build a tiny house in order to keep her family and community together. The Filipina-American author Mae Respicio published her middle-grade novel The House That Lou Built in 2018.
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