photocreditYou may remember my review a few months back about Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Gilead. Home is the companion book to Gilead, happening simultaneously in the same town, but the other main family in the story, the Boughtons.
This is a bittersweet novel about the main characters, Jack, a loved but much worried over estranged son that the family hasn't seen in over 20 years, and the sister, unmarried at 38 and caring for the aging father. Gilead, it's former, just grazes the question of Boughton family secrets, since it is more of a letter to a son from his dying father, but the characters Jack and Glory do make small appearances.
I found this book to be much more somber and heartbreaking than Gilead. The book is almost joyful, even though the subject matter is so sad. Gilead was some of the most beautiful prose in a novel I have ever read, Home, however, had lost that zeal for poetry.
The story was good, however, I would not recommend this book to stand on it's own if you haven't read Gilead. It completes Gilead, but it is a hard book to read if you don't know the characters and the main story outline at the beginning. I did appreciate this novel's nod to simpler times, when families could talk openly and at length about the healing road they sometimes faced.
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