America's most celebrated novelist, Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison extends her profound take on our history with this twentieth-century tale of redemption: a taut and tortured story about one man's desperate search for himself in a world disfigured by war.
Frank Money is an angry, self-loathing veteran of the Korean War who, after traumatic experiences on the front lines, finds himself back in racist America with more than just physical scars. His home may seem alien to him, but he is shocked out of his crippling apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and take her back to the small Georgia town they come from and that he's hated all his life. As Frank revisits his memories from childhood and the war that have left him questioning his sense of self, he discovers a profound courage he had thought he could never possess again.
A deeply moving novel about an apparently defeated man finding his manhood - and his home.
"Home" is very short - a novella rather than a novel - and the details are sketchy. It gives the impression of something boiled down to its essence, nothing extraneous. Morrison focuses on the internal experiences of characters not given to introspection. This is not navel-gazing, it is voyeurism at it finest... a great example of powerful storytelling from an established writer who has not lost her touch. (Reviewed by Beverly Melven).
Los Angeles Times, David L. Ulin
[A] thin book with some beautiful writing that ultimately comes off as insubstantial and contrived. Part of the problem is that everything happens too quickly, with no real sense of what's at stake. But even more it is the author's — or the narrator's — distance, the sense that Morrison is not fully invested in this fictional world...
Ultimately, the impression with which "Home" leaves us is of a novel that, like the town it encircles, is "much less than enough." Or maybe it's that the book seems tired, as if it were something we've read before. Either way, it leaves us wanting, without the discovery, the recognition of how stories can enlarge us, that defines Morrison's most vivid work.
New York Times
This haunting, slender novel is a kind of tiny Rosetta Stone to Toni Morrison’s entire oeuvre... Ms. Morrison has found a new, angular voice and straight-ahead storytelling style that showcase her knowledge of her characters, and the ways in which violence and passion and regret are braided through their lives, the ways in which love and duty can redeem a blighted past.
Kirkus Reviews
Starred Review. A deceptively rich and cumulatively powerful novel... A novel that illuminates truths that its characters may not be capable of articulating.
Booklist
Starred Review. Morrison, one of our national literary treasures, continues to marshal her considerable talents to draw a deeply moving narrative and draw in a wide range of appreciative readers... bound to be a big hit.
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. [An] immaculate new novel... Beautiful, brutal, as is Morrison's perfect prose.
Library Journal
At 160 pages, this is not a big brass band of a novel but a chamber work, effectively telescoping Morrison's passion and lush language.
The Guardian
...if Morrison had finished writing the novel she so carefully began, it might have been one of her best in years. But at well under 200 pages with wide margins, Home barely begins before it ends... Home should be relentless, unsparing, but Morrison relents halfway through, and spares everyone – most of all herself.
The Telegraph
["Home" is] much more linguistically subdued than most of her work, and her grand themes of redemption, homecoming, and self-ownership do not work best on a small scale. Still, slice it anywhere and you will find striking moments, dialogue that sings with life, and the mythic American landscape and its people surviving within it.
In Home, Cee learns to quilt while recovering from a near-fatal run-in with a doctor who used poor, black women as experimental subjects in his research. After returning to her hometown, her neighbors keep her company in her sickroom and, with their help, she makes her first quilt. She also starts to put together the broken pieces of her life to make something she can call her own and be proud of.
I am not a quilter. I'm fascinated by patterns and mosaics, but the sewing part of the equation has kept me from diving in. However, I did live with a dedicated quilter for a while, and watching her piece together those beautiful quilts was fascinating and humbling. Making something beautiful and functional from scraps is a wonderful metaphor, and appears in a bunch of great books. Here are a few of my favorites:
The Girl Who Stopped Swimming by Joshilyn Jackson
In this mystery (also a family drama and...
A passionate journey through a landscape charged with the supernatural and scarred by political violence, in a novel that bears witness to the traditions, suffering, and wisdom of an entire people.
It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm - a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two young men return from the war to work the land. It is the unlikely friendship of these brothers-in-arms that drives this powerful novel to its...
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Stranger than fiction, blending tragedy and farce, How to Create the Perfect Wife is an engrossing tale of the radicalism, and deep contradictions, at the heart of the Enlightenment.
Z, the novel about the life of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald is at points charming and; like another reviewer, I kept thinking of the movie, "Midnight...
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Although heavy on the scientific details, which slowed down the story for me (OK, I admit, I was one of those liberal arts majors who skipped out on...
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Loved this book. Magical, quirky, enchanting I could go on. All books do not have to be literary fiction, sometimes it is just so comforting to read...
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U.S. ebook sales up in 2012, but rate of growth is slowing(May 16 2013) In 2012, trade book sales (i.e. non academic book sales) rose 6.9%, to $15.049 billion, and e-book sales continued to grow, although the rate of growth...
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(874 words).
Los Angeles Times, David L. Ulin
Kirkus Reviews
The Guardian
The Girl Who Stopped Swimming by Joshilyn Jackson
