When the White House Was Ours

by Porter Shreve

Book Overview

Loosely based on Porter Shreve's own childhood, When the White House Was Ours is the atmospheric and captivating story of a family's struggle to stay together against great odds.

It's 1976, and while the country prepares to celebrate the bicentennial, Daniel Truitt's family is falling apart. His father, Pete, has been fired from yet another teaching job, and his mother, Valerie, is one step away from leaving for good. But when Pete lucks into...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0618722106
• ISBN13: 9780618722105
• Release Date: August 2008
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.6" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Coming of Age in 1976 Washington

It's rare that a new novel by a respected writer is published by a mainstream press, gets reviewed in both the New York and Los Angeles Times, and yet fails to generate a single user comment here, even after six months of publication. And yet it happens a handful of times a year -- for whatever reason, a perfectly good book makes barely a ripple on the big pool of readers out there. In this particular case, I am inclined to blame the title, which ties the book too directly to the presidency at a time (the election) when presidential books are flooding the bookstores. Another problem is the terrible cover, which is utterly generic and does nothing to convey the book's tone or time -- if anything, it conveys the opposite of the book's tone! This is all too bad, because it's actually quite an engaging story. The narrator is 12-year-old Daniel, whose family is moving to Washington, D.C. during the 1976 bicentennial summer under somewhat dubious circumstances. It seems that his father has been fired from another teaching/administrative post, and despite a quickly dwindling bank account, has decided to start his own freeform school in a rundown Victorian mansion in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood. Although this move is just another in a long line for Daniel and his younger sister, it's the last chance for their parent's marriage, which has been steadily worn thin by the years of bouncing around the country. If this school doesn't work out, it will be the last straw for their mother -- who is sick of the father's big ideas and shaky execution. The story runs more or less in tandem with the 1976 presidential race, as the family arrives in Washington and struggles to acclimate and get the school off the ground. They are quickly joined by the mother's hippie brother, his hippie sort-of wife, and an abrasive hippie third wheel. With a combination of hard work, lying, grifting, tips from Abbie Hoffman's "Steal This Book," and luck, the odd collective actually manages to launch the school and gradually enroll some students. It's loosely modeled on the famous Summerhill school in England, where the motto is "Act first, ask permission later" and the teachers and students are all seen as equal collaborators. If this sounds very '70s -- well, it is. The story captures both the era's idealistic visions of possibility and change, as well as the inherent weaknesses of those ideals. So it's not that surprising when the family and school's high point coincides with the Carter inauguration, only to slide into malaise in the months that follow. As a Washingtonian, I found it a compelling example of a family coming to the nation's capital with a dream and seeing that dream falter in the face of practical concerns. And having not spent the '70s in the U.S., it's an interesting glimpse into a time I'm unfamiliar with. Daniel is a capable narrator, with a budding love interest and an obsession with presidential trivia. Unfortunately, the plot relies a little too heavily