Summary and Reviews of Home by Toni Morrison

Media Reviews

New York Times This haunting, slender novel is a kind of tiny Rosetta Stone to Toni Morrison’s entire oeuvre... Ms. Morrison has found a new, angular voice and straight-ahead storytelling style that showcase her knowledge of her characters, and the ways in which violence and passion and regret are braided through their lives, the ways in which love and duty can redeem a blighted past.

Los Angeles Times, David L. Ulin [A] thin book with some beautiful writing that ultimately comes off as insubstantial and contrived. Part of the problem is that everything happens too quickly, with no real sense of what's at stake. But even more it is the author's — or the narrator's — distance, the sense that Morrison is not fully invested in this fictional world... Ultimately, the impression with which "Home" leaves us is of a novel that, like the town it encircles, is "much less than enough." Or maybe it's that the book seems tired, as if it were something we've read before. Either way, it leaves us wanting, without the discovery, the recognition of how stories can enlarge us, that defines Morrison's most vivid work.

The Guardian ...if Morrison had finished writing the novel she so carefully began, it might have been one of her best in years. But at well under 200 pages with wide margins, Home barely begins before it ends... Home should be relentless, unsparing, but Morrison relents halfway through, and spares everyone – most of all herself.

The Telegraph ["Home" is] much more linguistically subdued than most of her work, and her grand themes of redemption, homecoming, and self-ownership do not work best on a small scale. Still, slice it anywhere and you will find striking moments, dialogue that sings with life, and the mythic American landscape and its people surviving within it.

Booklist Starred Review. Morrison, one of our national literary treasures, continues to marshal her considerable talents to draw a deeply moving narrative and draw in a wide range of appreciative readers... bound to be a big hit.

Kirkus Reviews Starred Review. A deceptively rich and cumulatively powerful novel... A novel that illuminates truths that its characters may not be capable of articulating.

Library Journal At 160 pages, this is not a big brass band of a novel but a chamber work, effectively telescoping Morrison's passion and lush language.

Publishers Weekly Starred Review. [An] immaculate new novel... Beautiful, brutal, as is Morrison's perfect prose.

Reader Reviews

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• Literary Fiction
  
• USA
  
• 1940s & '50s
  
• Coming of Age
  
• Dealing with Loss
  
• Black Authors
  
• War Related