** spoiler alert ** Totally compelling and hard to put down, and not just because of the can't-look-away nature of hoarding, but because of the tense, first-person, 24-hour world that is created, in which I cared as much about the budding romance as I did the escape from the house full of trash.

I never thought about what it would be like to be kid in a house in which nothing is thrown away, ever, in a lethal combination of conservation and deal-seeking/shopping addiction -- and the side effects of not being able to have anyone come in the house, ever, from friends to relatives to someone to repair the furnace. And then there are the debt and health issues. Suffice it to say, this book made me want to clean and purge my stuff.

Favorite quotes:

"Aunt Jean hadn't worried about recycling. She'd even resorted to a shovel at one point as we filled up the Dumpster. I had to stop seeing each little thing individually and start seeing it as one giant thing that stood between me and the rest of my life."

"It was like she used up all her energy thinking about possibilities for reusing stuff, so she never got around to actually doing it. As long as something could be labeled useful, it was allowed to stay, and if you thought about it hard enough you could figure out a use for just about anything."