Kate Racculia » Author

About Kate

Kate grew up in Syracuse, New York, and attended college at the University of Buffalo, where she studied illustration, design, Jane Austen, and Canada. After a year in Philadelphia as a Barnes & Noble children’s bookseller, she moved to Boston for graduate school and received her MFA from Emerson College. Now she calls Boston home. She likes chowder but not lobster, and has been a bassoonist, a planetarium operator, a coffee jerk, a designer, a proposal writer, a prospect researcher, and a karaoke god.

She watches more movies than is probably healthy and is most likely reading a book right at this moment. Sometimes she talks not to, but for inanimate objects, and she firmly believes the finest flavor combination on this planet is chocolate and peanut butter.

Kate is, as if you couldn’t tell, kind of a geek.

This Must Be the Place is her first novel. She is working on her second, which will be stupendous.

This Must Be the Place

HOLY AWESOME. This Must Be the Place has been named a 2011 Must-Read Book by the Massachusetts Center for the Book! Read more here.

A sudden death, a never-mailed postcard, and a long-buried secret set the stage for a luminous and heartbreakingly real novel about lost souls finding one another.

The Darby-Jones boardinghouse in Ruby Falls, New York, is home to Mona Jones and her daughter, Oneida, two loners and self-declared outcasts who have formed a perfectly insular family unit: the two of them and the three eclectic boarders living in their house. But their small, quiet life is upended when Arthur Rook shows up in the middle of a nervous breakdown, devastated by the death of his wife, carrying a pink shoebox containing all his wife’s mementos and keepsakes, and holding a postcard from sixteen years ago, addressed to Mona but never sent. Slowly the contents of the box begin to fit together to tell a story—one of a powerful friendship, a lost love, and a secret that, if revealed, could change everything that Mona, Oneida, and Arthur know to be true. Or maybe the stories the box tells and the truths it brings to life will teach everyone about love—how deeply it runs, how strong it makes us, and how even when all seems lost, how tightly it brings us together. With emotional accuracy and great energy, This Must Be the Place introduces memorable, charming characters that refuse to be forgotten.

“Never has it been more aptly presented than in this engaging novel that love can take us all on unexpected journeys–often when we least expect it. Here is a story that is part mystery, part meditation, part romance, part imperative. It is presented from different points of view: cake-baking Mona, mistress of a boarding house, for whom a long-ago act of love for a friend leads to a complicated romance. Mona’s teenage daughter, Oneida, whose tentative forays into love bring her far more than she anticipated. And Arthur, a man widowed too soon, on a path that will lead him to understand who his young wife really was. Kate Racculia has a strong and original voice, and a lot to say about the chances we take–or miss.”

—Elizabeth Berg, author of THE LAST TIME I SAW YOU

For more reviews, check out the Press page!