Home: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Marilynne Robinson
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
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Rating:  40 reviews
Sales Rank: 362
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.5 x 1.3
ISBN: 0374299102
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780374299101
ASIN: 0374299102
Publication Date: September 2, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Condition: Brand New!!! bce
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Product Description
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Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, September 2008: "What does it mean to come home?" In one way or another, every character in Home is searching for that answer. Glory Boughton, now 38 and lovelorn, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father. Her wayward brother Jack also finds his way back, though his is an uneasy homecoming, reverberating with the scandal that drove him away twenty years earlier. Glory and Jack unravel their stories slowly, speaking to each other more in movements than in words--a careful glance here, a chair pulled out from the table there--against a domestic backdrop so richly imagined you may be fooled into believing their house is your own. Meanwhile, their father, whose ebullient love for his children is a welcome counterpoint to Glory and Jack's conflicted emotions, experiences his own kind of reckoning as he yearns to understand his troubled son. There is a simplicity to this story that belies the complexity of its characters--they are bound together by a profound capacity for love and by an equally powerful sense of private conviction that tries the ties that bind, but never breaks them. It's a delicate sort of tension that you think would resist exposition--and in fact these characters seem to want nothing more than, as Glory says, to treat "one another's deceptions like truth"--but Marilynne Robinson's fine, tender prose imbues this family's secrets with an overwhelming grace. --Anne Bartholomew
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| Customer Reviews: Read 35 more reviews...
 Tedious November 15, 2008
Normally I enjoy literary novels and good writing. I don't require a lot of action, flashy settings, glamourous characters, or what have you.
I was disappointed to find Home simply tedious. Very little action, repetitive dialogue, nothing to enjoy in any of the characters, nothing even to look forward to for their futures (either for them or for us.)
If you enjoy reading about theological debates circa 1950, thinly veiled Bible-based racism, figurative hair-shirt-wearing, uncontrolled weeping, and crotchety but not feisty old men, by all means pick up Home.
I found it to be the literary equivalent of a big spoonful of cod liver oil: probably not without hidden healthful qualities, but requiring a good deal of determination to choke it down.
 Beautiful, touching, perfect November 15, 2008
Maybe not perfect, because it did come to an end. This is truly one of the most beautiful books I have ever read. I read Gilead after Home, and found it equally as beautiful. It is a story set in a simpler time, when things like good behavior and honor mattered more. The things that set Jack so far apart from his family would not seem like such a big deal now.The relationship of Jack and Glory is skilfully written, and it is easy to feel her pain and hope. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.
A bit too sloww, still worth reading... November 4, 2008
I was excited to see that this book had been released since I loved GILEAD so much. While I enjoyed HOME, I probably did not like it as much as it's predecessor.
Both books are very similar in tone and content (not surprising since they are parallel pieces to each other), but I found HOME to move at a much more slower pace then GILEAD and that's saying something considering how slowly placed GILEAD is. It took me several days to complete this book. That's not to say it's boring. It's not. It's just that I think there is a bit too much repetitiveness.
Still, I recommend HOME to anyone who loved GILEAD. Both books compliment each other very well. They are not plot driven stories, but beautifully written books about people.
 Poor narrator November 3, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This review refers to the audiobook.
It's a shame. The narrator sounds like she's narrating an episode of Dynasty. Breathy and melodramatic. Like a congested divorcee waving around a glass of wine while she talks about her teenage glory days in the Hamptons.
In other words, definitely not suited to this material.
aging children, aged father October 29, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
In her Pulitzer Prize winner Gilead, named the #1 fiction book of 2004 by the New York Times, Marilynne Robinson told the story of Pastor John Ames, a fourth generation Congregationalist pastor in Gilead, Iowa. More exactly, she allowed Pastor Ames to tell his own story, for the book is a 240-page letter from the 76-year-old Ames to his seven-year-old son. In the letter Pastor Ames looks inwardly to untangle how his present reality in his old and feeble years relates to whatever constitutes Ultimate Reality. Parts of his letter also fret about "the beloved child of my oldest and dearest friend." That would be "Jack" (John) Boughton, son of Gilead's Presbyterian pastor, Robert Boughton, who is named after Ames himself.
In a parallel but independent story, Home takes us back to Gilead in the 1950s. Glory, age 38 and the youngest of eight Boughton children, has left her teaching job in Des Moines and returned to Gilead to care for her aged and feeble father, Robert. She's deeply lonely and never married, although we learn she does have a romantic past. As a good pastor's kid, she still reads her Bible, and since Robert is a widower, Glory takes charge of all things domestic. Without explanation, the black sheep of the family, Jack, returns home after a twenty year absence. Jack is 43, an alcoholic, a thief who has spent time in prison, a miscreant who fathered a child out of wedlock, and, worst of all for his loving father, a decided non-believer. But Jack knows the Scriptures better than most, he plays hymns for his father, and he has a broken heart for an unlikely woman who did him nothing but good. He's come home seeking reconciliation. But that is easier said than done.
The Bible's parable of the prodigal son is far neater than this family's story. "It's a powerful thing, family," says Robert (176). Indeed, it is, especially when your family is a pastor's family brimming with Presbyterian probity and earnestness, a family that is good in order to look good. "Such a wonderful family they were!" (7). But there are no villains in this story. Father Robert is tired, sad, and tirelessly tender; he falls asleep at dinner, succumbs to dementia, and is vexed at how and why Jack arrived at his sorry state. Glory is the peace keeper who moves between accepting people, trying to fix them, and enabling them. Jack is irony personified. These are lovable characters. They have secrets that define them, roles that have been assigned to them for decades, memories both pleasant and painful, all come together in a house full of family ghosts. "This life on earth is a strange business," says Glory (253). And so she prays at dinner what we all hope and pray, "Dear God in heaven, please help us. Dear God, please help everyone we love. Amen." (292).
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