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Home
Marilynne Robinson
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"I chose to read Marilynne Robinson's Home because I was transported from having read her novel Gilead that came out a couple of years ago. This book Home is described as kind of a companion piece or maybe the brother of the book Gilead.
Gilead is a story set in a small town in Iowa involving an older man, older minister, written first person; he married late in life to a younger woman, has a young child. In that particular book, Gilead, which won the Pulitzer Prize, is a book where he, in the series of letters, talks about his life and shares his life with his young boy. What comes up in that particular book is he is good friends with another minister who lives down the block, who has his own family circumstances, and that family becomes the center of the book Home.
Home is a story, and it's an amazingly simple story, of essentially three people. It is the father, the reverend in this older household, his daughter, who has come home after some personal disappointments in her life, and then even more dramatic, a son,his son, one of his sons, who has been away for 20 years. The black sheep of the family, kind of the bad boy, has come home as well, and the three of them are now living back in the old homestead.
It is an amazingly simple plot structure; it is just these three characters. There is drama, there is depth of character, there's an emotional level in the book that is powerful; I was moved to tears several times in the reading of this book. If you're able to slow yourself down to kind of match the speed of this book, there's a beauty to it that is remarkable.
I would recommend this book to anyone. There is a beautiful spirituality. I think that if you are someone who has a sense of spirit and God and religion, it's a really important part of your life, it's a really part of this book.
I'd give this five stars also."
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