📖 Home

There are some authors who have such a presence in the literary world that it can actually put you off reading them, Toni Morrison has always been one such author for me. I have heard so many people talk about her work, in particular with reference to ‘Beloved’, and how amazing her writing is that I have always feared I might pick a novel of hers and simply not ‘get’ it. Yet, as I am sure you all know, sometimes life throws these authors and their books in our paths. I ended up being sent ‘Home’, Morrison’s latest novella, by We Love This Book to review and so, with slight trepidation, I finally got around to reading my first Toni Morrison work. In the very first chapter of ‘Home’ we are given a flashback of something horrific happening in a young man’s childhood sometime in the past. In the second we join him (well we assume it is him) as he lies trying to work out his escape from a psychiatric ward in the 1950’s. It is in these two brief and instant portraits of a character that we meet our narrator, 24 year old Korean War veteran Frank Money and instantly we want to know more about him. What happened in his childhood that he barely comprehends and yet leads him to drink? Why is he locked in a psychiatric hospital and why must he escape at any cost? It’s this style of mysterious, yet very restrained, prose that makes us as the reader almost unable to put ‘Home’ down for its deceptive 142 pages.