Home review

I'm a little late blogging this, but here's my review of Home, by Marilynne Robinson. 

In Gilead, a sleepy little town in Iowa in 1956, the elderly minister Robert Boughton is dying, cared for by his unmarried adult daughter, Glory.

" 'Home to stay, Glory! Yes!' her father said, and her heart sank," begins Marilynne Robinson's latest novel, Home, which is a finalist for this year's National Book Award for fiction.

Interrupting the quiet procession of the pair's days together is a letter from Jack — the black sheep son and brother gone for 20 years. Now in his 40s, he has yet to live down the bad deeds of his youth: cutting classes, stealing and, most grievously to Boughton, fathering an illegitimate child with a girl he doesn't love. ...

These characters will be familiar to readers of Gilead, Robinson's 2005 Pulitzer Prize winner. Not a sequel nor a prequel, Home eerily chronicles the same events as Gilead, but this time told from the perspective of Glory as she muddles through the drama of her brother's sudden reappearance.

This was a tough review for me to write, because I really loved Gilead, and there were a lot of things I found unsatisfying about Home, more for emotional reasons than easily defined artistic and/or critical reasons. Anyway, read the complete review here.