Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
I don't think I have ever read a novel that so accurately describes the thoughts and actions and motivations of human beings. There was not one false note in this entire book. People acted in this book how they actually do in real life (at least in my experience). Their feelings of love and anger and self-hate were so acute, I often found myself relating to each character more than once. Maybe some of this comes from where I am emotionally right now—somewhere teetering between hope and devastati...
“Home” is not a sequel to “Gilead”, it is a story that lapses at the same time but told from a different perspective. In fact, this novel could easily be read as a treatise about family, a sort of rich catalog of the varied ways in which a father can hurt a son, a brother can hurt a sister, or vice versa, precisely because they love each other. It’s a sad story about miscommunication and failed good intentions wasted over the years that lead to an anticlimactic peak of boundless frustration.The
This is the story of a Christian family and how it negotiates the slow fade of its patriarch, the Reverend Robert Boughton. Add to that the recent jilting of daughter Glory who has suffered humiliations from a married man. And the life gone wrong of son Jack, a troublemaker and petty thief since boyhood, now the prodigal son returned. The sad thing to see is how locked they all are into their conceptions of sin, transgression, dishonor. One wishes they could lighten up, especially old Boughton.
What is a “home?” Can you ever go “home?” I am a bit confounded by my attempts to write a review of this novel.When Benjamin Franklin said “A house is not a home….” he was concerned with a place that provided “food and fire for the mind as well as the body.” I am not sure how Marilynne Robinson would make the distinction between the two but she gives us many clues."Twenty years was long enough to make a stranger of someone she had known far better than this brother of hers, and here he was in he...
It was an interesting experience for me to read this book, since I have not now been a member of a church since I was 28 and I now near 63. Agnostic is how I identify my “religious faith” on Facebook. Depending on whom it is I talk with, I can teeter in different directions. The church I was raised to attend is the (Dutch) Christian Reformed Church, and my pastor was widely seen as the most conservative preacher in the Grand Rapids (MI) area. Every year I lived in my father’s house (yes, one onl...
A perfect companion to the awful Gilead. Again, it is well-written, and the main character has a lot more to offer, being the lost son of the preacher's friend. He comes home and tries to live up to the moral and religious standards of his family, and the story could have been really good if Christian absolute truth hadn't been imposed on the main character and reader alike ALL THE TIME. I found myself yelling at the poor sinful son: "If you say SORRY just once more, I will throw this book out t...
4.5 stars If you’ve read Gilead or Lila the characters will be familiar, but yet the story is told from a different perspective. The focus of this story is on Jack Boughton, the wayward son of retired minister, the aging Robert Boughton. Jack returns home to Gilead, seeking an understanding of himself, seeking answers to the question of whether or not he is worthy of redemption, of perhaps starting a new life in this old place he once called home with a woman he loves. The story is told through
5+ stars. The hope that I will find a book like this one is the reason I read.Home. A word that conveys so many different meanings that for each person it is as individual as a fingerprint. For Jack Boughton, it is a place he has run from, longed for, and never quite fit into. For his sister, Glory, it is a place she loves, wishes to escape from, but knows she will be tied to all of her life. Thomas Wolfe told us “you can never go home again”, Marilynne Robinson seems to say you can never leave
I hate to say this as it sounds so trite and I’m certainly not religious but this is indeed one of those novels that has been touched by the hand of grace. Marilynne Robinson in her unique inimitable way has produced a sublime work that exquisitely captures the life of Reverend Boughton and his children Glory and Jack. This novel encapsulates the ideals of family life and solidarity regardless of what becomes of them and what is so touching is that Jack, the wayward son, who did everything out o...
After sleeping with the emotional state this book left me in, I have edited my review and changed it to a solid five stars. "It is a book unsparing in its acknowledgment of sin and unstinting in its belief in the possibility of grace. It is at once hard and forgiving, bitter and joyful, fanatical and serene. “From "The Return Of The Prodigal Son.” A New York Times book review by A. O. ScottI just don’t know what I can say or add about this book. Really. It broke my heart and I loved it anyway.