A Novella and Stories by Toni Ann Johnson – Compulsive Reader

Reviewed by Hazel Kight Witham

What We Carry, What We Release: The Arringtons Revisited

But Where’s Home: A Novella and Stories
by Toni Ann Johnson
Screen Door Press
February 2026, 232 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1967165032

Toni Ann Johnson’s latest collection But Where’s Home? is her third dive into the family of Maddie Arrington, her parents Phil and Velma, and their extended family. Johnson’s  2021 novella, Homegoing focused on Maddie’s adulthood and return to her childhood town, while the linked stories in Light Skin Gone to Waste (2023) deepens our understanding of what that childhood was like for young Maddie growing up Black in a predominantly white neighborhood and overwhelmingly chaotic family. In But Where’s Home? the Arrington universe expands with linked stories surrounding the novella that gives the book its name and its central question. One striking thing about Johnson’s connected books is that they can be enjoyed in any order–each volume deepens the understanding of this family and their quest to find belonging.

The Arringtons are a Black family navigating a white upper middle class neighborhood in Monroe, New York in the late 1960s through the 1980s. In this collection we begin before Maddie is born, as she actively chooses her family from some other realm, a soul intent on atoning and healing past grief and a loss of connection from a previous lifetime. The premise and shifting perspectives set up an intriguing thread: how are we connected across lifetimes, within and outside of family? How does grief and trauma–both intergenerational and those playing out in our present lifetime–guide us to seek greater connection? 

Johnson’s approach offers vivid insight from multiple character’s perspectives, from Maddie’s parents, her cousin Suzy and half-sister Livia, deepening the nuance and complexity of those perspectives–including the views of a range of white neighbors who both connect with the family and act out their deep-seated racism. From navigating relationships with her white neighbors, and later students and romantic partners, Maddie is often in the position of parenting her parents, especially her mother Velma, whose self-obsession and violent tantrums are only occasionally subdued when Maddie summons the courage to stand up to her. In all these relationships, Maddie is often on unsteady ground, struggling to feel valued by others. 

Both of Maddie’s parents seek connection outside the family rather than in it. Phil collects people, specifically white, often married women, while Velma collects antiques–relics of the past she is still grieving. Johnson plumbs deeper into Maddie’s father Phil’s psyche, illuminating his narcissism, his quest to be accepted in predominently white spaces and find love with white women. We see Phil’s limited self-awareness again and again, despite his education and career in as a psychologist. Even as Phil’s philandering infuriates the women in his family, he remains intriguing in scenes where he tells his own story to captive audiences. 

While Phil and Velma loop through destructive, self-absorbed patterns, Maddie and her half-sister Livia, daughters of Phil and mothers who did not have much to give, find their own way home. 

In the novella, Johnson moves us through time with Maddie’s journal from 1980 to Velma’s experience of reading the journal 16 years later. Family dynamics shift as Maddie heads off to study voice and theater at NYU–another predominantly white space–instead of following her cousin Suzy to Howard, where she could have a different experience at an HBCU. 

The novella offers an intimate view into Maddie’s experience freshman year in 1980 through a journal she keeps for a writing workshop. She navigates friendships with a new roommate, a white girl named Jennifer who teaches her how to binge and purge, and her acting class crush, Gustavo, who flirts with her but also is still entangled with a girlfriend. 

At a critical point during Maddie’s first fall semester, Velma reveals a tightly held family secret and Maddie is transported into her grandmother’s point of view: “that doorway, facing the little girl she’d lost and longing for things to be different. It was somehow familiar, like my own memory.” 

Maddie returns to her childhood home during her fall semester and sees it in a new light, reflecting on the choices her parents made when facing social pressures: “‘things’ shouldn’t be the sum of our family’s experience, but that’s what it feels like its been for them–aquiring stuff, and houses, and vacations, and status. For show. To prove how far they’ve come,” instead of building a true home in relationship, in “love and happiness.”

The main storyline of 1980 is interspersed with snapshots of Phil’s perspective as well as a flash forward to 1996, to check in with Velma. By the end,  Maddie has experienced new connections with men who are imperfect but influential, and finds herself alone, outside a bar in NYC on New Year’s Eve, listening to the accomplished singer Alberta Hunter, a woman she admires deeply. Maddie watches and listens from the street, and finds in the music confirmation of her own identity as an artist, further illuminating the book’s central question.

Johnson’s writing–her vivid detail, sharp dialogue and insightful, deftly witty scenes–reveal a family of distinct, complicated individuals grappling with the internal and external impact of our society’s stereotypes, but also asks us to look more closely at our own relationships. The nuanced, multi-faceted exploration of love in so many challenging settings–within family, within community, within society–invites us to consider what we hold on to and what we must let go of to make a nourishing home for ourselves and authentic connections with others. 

About the reviewer: Hazel Kight Witham is a mother, teacher, writer, artist and slam coach, with a BA from Brown University and an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles. Hazel is the co-creator of the Take a Minute Substack, and her memoir-in-verse The Truth About Secrets came out in June, 2024.