Where I’m From: The Hometown as a Character, a guest post by Amanda DeWitt

There are two questions people ask when you first move away from home: where are you from?
And: why did you move?
Good questions! When I first moved from Florida to Colorado, I would say ‘well, you know, Florida’ and people would nod because it was 2023 and…well, Florida. The people from Texas always nodded along with more understanding than most.
It made me realize a lot of things—how we can have such a mixed relationship with the place we’re from, but also that the word relationship highlights a certain personification of it. A town isn’t a person, but it certainly has a personality. In some ways, our hometowns can shape us just as much as a parent might. It’s something that I took with me when I went into writing The Underwood Tapes.
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The Underwood Tapes is set in Hermitage, Florida, a small town on the Gulf Coast. Because even though I was in the process of leaving Florida at the time, there were still things I loved about it that I wanted to preserve in amber—thunderclouds over the Gulf and the sound of humid summer nights. The Gulf coast because that’s where I’m from and I don’t understand how the Atlantic works, and a small town because when it comes to setting as a character, there’s nothing like a small town. I wanted there to be an inter-generational mystery to the story, and a small town is the only place where not can your family have lived there for generations, but the town is more or less a member of your family itself. So I created a sun-bleached little town, too overgrown with palmettos and with beaches too scraggly for developers to build condos on. A place that doesn’t change, but doesn’t grow either.

Here’s where I’ve misled you though: Hermitage isn’t Grace’s hometown. It’s her mother’s. Grace’s mom left Hermitage when she turned eighteen and never went back, but when she dies in a car accident, it’s the only place that Grace can go to get away from the memories. The Underwood Tapes is, at its heart, a book about grief, and the way Grace inherits her mom’s hometown is just another part of that. In my experience, something strange happens when a parent dies when you’re still young. You inherit almost a part of the empty space they left behind in the eyes of the people around you, blurring the line between your generation and the one that came before you.
In many ways, that’s what happens to Grace when she comes to stay with the uncle in Hermitage. People look at her and see her mom, which forces her not only to remember the pain she’s trying to run from, but realize that these people knew a version of her mom that she never did. More than that, she actually inherits the same mystery that drove her mom to leave after her best friend Jake Underwood went missing in Hurricane Andrew. When Grace realizes she’s able to communicate with Jake across time through cassette tapes and befriends him, she becomes committed to finding out what really happened. This unspools the mystery of the secret that’s haunted Hermitage for generations as she investigates what really happened to Jake’s uncle in the 1970’s.
One drowned boy in the 1970’s is a small tragedy, in the grand scheme of things, but the scars it left behind in Hermitage are clear, even in 2022, the summer Grace spends there. Much like Hermitage itself, the people who live there don’t change. Only Grace’s mom left. The rest of her generation, and the one before that, linger in the same patterns, living under the burden of those scars but perpetuating them at the same time. It hangs over Hermitage like the summer heat, unseen but oppressive with its weight. In many ways, the town is both the keeper of the secret and suffers just as much as the people in it do, forced to remain stagnant, a relic of the past.

Grace inherits the baggage of Hermitage from her mom, but she’s also able to see it with clearer eyes than the people who grew up there, and it allows her the drive—and sometimes the desperation—she needs to uncover the truth about what really happened. And you could just as easily say the town wants the truth to come to light almost as badly as it wants to keep it hidden. After all, something allows Grace and Jake to communicate through the tapes despite the thirty years between them, and on the beach, there are moments Grace is able to sense the past, as if Hermitage really was a collection of all that ever happened in it, happening all at once, separating only by the thin veil of time.
We create the place we live in, but it also creates us, and it’s impossible to tell where one influence starts and the other begins. In The Underwood Tapes, Hermitage itself represents old wounds left untended and the impact they have on future generations. It also represents a piece of Florida itself, and my relationship with it. Something beautiful and ugly at the same time, a place that can both love and hurt you. But if The Underwood Tapes is about one thing, it’s that those wounds can be healed from.
Meet the author

Amanda DeWitt is an author and librarian, ensuring that she spends as much time around books as possible. She also enjoys Star Wars, Dungeons & Dragons-ing, and even more writing—just not whatever it is she really should be writing. She graduated from the University of South Florida with a master’s in library and information science. She lives in Denver, Colorado, with her two dogs and a very small cat.
AmandaDeWitt.com
Instagram – @am.dewitt
X – @AmandaMDeWitt
About The Underwood Tapes
A captivating and profoundly moving novel with hints of supernatural intrigue, blending We Were Liars and Your Name into a can’t-miss read for fans of You’ve Reached Sam.
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Thirty years ago, Grace’s mom left her hometown of Hermitage, Florida and never looked back—which is exactly why Grace thinks it’s the safest place to spend her summer now. Since her mom died in a car crash, Grace has been desperate to get away from the memories and reminders of her loss. Spending the summer transcribing cassette tapes for the Hermitage Historical Society might be boring, but boring is just what Grace needs.
Until she hears the voice of Jake Underwood—the boy who first recorded the cassette tapes back in 1992. When Grace realizes he can hear anything she records, despite thirty years of time between them, they strike up an impossible conversation through the tapes.
But the past isn’t any simpler than the present, and a mystery has haunted Hermitage through the generations. In the 1970’s, a hurricane made landfall and resulted in the tragic death of Jake’s uncle Charley. In a town as suffocatingly small as Hermitage, it’s impossible not to notice how no one talks about that storm, or Charley, and as the mystery unfurls, Grace can’t help but realize a worse truth: No one talks about Jake either.
A beautifully written exploration of grief and what happens when untreated wounds bleed into future generations, The Underwood Tapes is the perfect read for anyone in need of a good, cathartic cry.
ISBN-13: 9781682635995
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Publication date: 02/04/2025
Age Range: 14 – 17 Years
Filed under: Guest Post

About Amanda MacGregor
Amanda MacGregor works in an elementary library, loves dogs, and can be found on BlueSky at @amandamacgregor.bsky.social.
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