The House That Lou Built

The Filipina-American author Mae Respicio published her middle-grade novel The House That Lou Built in 2018. 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 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). 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.

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. 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. Ever since Lou’s grandfather died a few years ago, the family has had a tough time financially. 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.

Lou is biracial, and grew up without knowing her white father, who died a few months before she was born. When he died, he left Minda and Lou a small parcel of undeveloped land. 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.



Taking the skills that she has been learning in her school’s woodshop class from her helpful teacher Mr. 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. 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.

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. But even after she gets her degree, jobs are hard to come by. 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. 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.

Desperate to stay with her big family, Lou works on her tiny house even more – especially after Mr. Keller nominates her for a construction award. But the problem is that Lou is too headstrong to listen to her mother’s warning about sneaking out to the property. Instead of getting her mother’s permission, Lou goes behind her back, traveling far from home by herself, and eventually lying not only to her mother but also to the very friends and family that have been secretly helping her all along.



Lou is convinced that if her mom could have her own place, she wouldn’t want to move away. At the same time, Lou also believes that if there is someone living on a piece of land, then the government wouldn’t be able to take it away, unpaid taxes or no. She is so desperate to hold on to this tangible piece of her father that she bursts into the local tax office and makes an impassioned speech to the official she finds there.

For a while, Lou’s sneaking around seems to be paying off. But one day, Minda gets a letter explaining that the tax debt is high enough that if it isn’t paid in 30 days, the land will be auctioned off. A tearful Lou confesses to her mom what she has been doing and is promptly grounded.

In the end, everything works out, though not in the way that Lou had originally intended. Still, she does manage to figure out that home isn’t the actual building where you live, but instead “it’s more of a feeling of comfort and trust, of people that are a part of you.” Through her tiny house, she has developed more of a connection with the father that she never knew, grew closer with her mother, and deepened her already strong friendships.