A Nest for Celeste: A Story About Art, Inspiration, and the Meaning of Home

Over the course of the novel, Celeste overcomes great loss and perseveres to find a home where she belongs. Her first home was ideal because it offered her safety, beauty, and belonging: “[S]he remembered a nest made of grasses in a tangle of timothy hay and wildflowers. She remembered three brothers and a sister, and a doting mother and father” (158). After she loses her family and her childhood home, each subsequent nest Celeste lives in offers these three traits in varying degrees. When the reader first meets Celeste, she is living in a dim, dusty nook that is devoid of beauty apart from the baskets she weaves, and she experiences bullying rather than belonging there. Celeste stays in the space under the floorboards because it shelters her from the cat and from humans. However, the nook doesn’t offer true physical or emotional safety because of Trixie and Illianna’s cruelty: “Celeste felt defenseless against the two marauders, who frequently bullied their way into her nook, ransacking and filching” (18). The Pirries’ cat advances the theme of the search for home and raises the suspense by blocking the mousehole under the sideboard. The cat represents an urgent threat to the mouse’s survival, but it also motivates her growth.