Home

About book:Hundreds of thousands of readers were enthralled and delighted by the luminous, tender voice of John Ames in Gilead, Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Now comes HOME, a deeply affecting novel that takes place in the same period and same Iowa town of Gilead. This is Jack's story. Jack - prodigal son of the Boughton family, godson and namesake of John Ames, gone twenty years - has come home looking for refuge and to try to make peace with a past littered with trouble and pain. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold down a job, Jack is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Boughton's most beloved child. His sister Glory has also returned to Gilead, fleeing her own mistakes, to care for their dying father. Brilliant, loveable, wayward, Jack forges an intense new bond with Glory and engages painfully with his father and his father's old friend John Ames.

My thoughts: This book was chosen for our book club September 2020. It is about the life of the Boughton family, specifically the father and two of his children Glory and Jack. Glory returns to the family home to care for her father who is dying and Jack, the prodigal son, who returns after 20 years who is trying to make peace with events from his past.

The book dragged on, and there were a lot more words on the paper than needed to be and the explanations and descriptions for things ran on in long rambling sentences so much so that they lost all meaning and made me want to skip pages and pages. The twists and turns meant I often had to re-read paragraphs, because I felt that I had lost sense of the story. The story frustrated me because it had potential to lead you through the lives of the three main characters, their secrets and histories that lead them to where they were and the interactions with others in the book. For me, a very disappointing read.