What readers think of The Homecoming of Samuel Lake, plus links to write your own review.

Reminiscent of 'To Kill a Mockingbird', the book centers on the precocious daughter of the title character. The book starts out slowly, giving the reader time to get to know, and like, the members of the Moses and Lake families. But once the plot takes off, its hard to put the book down. Overall a good read with well developed characters, and a villain that you just love to hate.

I was impressed by the author's ability to make her characters three dimensional, almost as if I was watching a film. Having grown up in the urban east coast , both this setting and period in history, were totally unfamiliar.
I enjoyed this book as it carried me along a character driven story which made me re-evaluate
the definition of family and how our lives can change with just one small adjustment in the wheel of life.
This would be an excellent selection for book club readers who really enjoy getting to know a novel's characters on a personal level.

"The Homecoming of Samuel Lake" is a well told family tale with characters I came to care about; what will happen to each of them?; how will their individual lives impact the other family members?

Tom Wolfe once stated "You can't go home again," and while this is not true literally, it is true in the sense that things will not be the same.

In this "homecoming" nothing stays the same, but is ever changing. I enjoyed reading the changes which made the book interesting and engaging.

At first, I didn't think I would be able to finish reading this book. There was just something about the writing style that threw me off. I decided to continue reading and I'm glad I did. The best part of the book is the likeable (for the most part) characters encountered along the way plus the fact that I kept wanting to know what was going to happen next. Its not a great book but it is worth a read.

I liked this book, but it might not be for everyone. Some of the situations in the book were hard to read about, although you know they happen in this world of ours. The writing was excellent, and represents many situations where people are trying to do the right thing. The only thing that threw me a little was that there were several things that happened that would have normally generated a little more in depth story telling and discussion, and instead they were somewhat skimmed over. Overall though, it was a good book that I would recommend.

This book started out with a bang, literally. Based on the beginning I thought it would be an interesting read, but something seemed to be missing. It gave a good depiction of life in rural Arkansas and focused on a somewhat dysfunctional family. Some of the characters were interesting buy many seemed to be part of the plot just to fill gaps in the narrative. One of the characters was particularly well-drawn. He was a truly evil person who another character described as "Satan's stepson". The story moved along but became somewhat boring and predictable. I also felt the title is misleading since, for me, Samuel Lake is a rather minor, under-developed character. The story never really seemed to reach it's potential as an interesting novel.