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Summary and Reviews of Home by Toni Morrison

Home by Toni Morrison

Home

by Toni Morrison
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (9):
  • First Published:
  • May 8, 2012, 160 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Jan 2013, 160 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

A taut and tortured story about one man's desperate search for himself in a world disfigured by war.

America's most celebrated novelist, Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison extends her profound take on our history with this twentieth-century tale of redemption: a taut and tortured story about one man's desperate search for himself in a world disfigured by war.

Frank Money is an angry, self-loathing veteran of the Korean War who, after traumatic experiences on the front lines, finds himself back in racist America with more than just physical scars. His home may seem alien to him, but he is shocked out of his crippling apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and take her back to the small Georgia town they come from and that he's hated all his life. As Frank revisits his memories from childhood and the war that have left him questioning his sense of self, he discovers a profound courage he had thought he could never possess again.

A deeply moving novel about an apparently defeated man finding his manhood - and his home.

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Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

"Home" is very short - a novella rather than a novel - and the details are sketchy. It gives the impression of something boiled down to its essence, nothing extraneous. Morrison focuses on the internal experiences of characters not given to introspection. This is not navel-gazing, it is voyeurism at it finest... a great example of powerful storytelling from an established writer who has not lost her touch...continued

Full Review (396 words)

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(Reviewed by Beverly Melven).

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Beyond the Book



Quilting As Hobby and Metaphor

In Home, Cee learns to quilt while recovering from a near-fatal run-in with a doctor who used poor, black women as experimental subjects in his research. After returning to her hometown, her neighbors keep her company in her sickroom and, with their help, she makes her first quilt. She also starts to put together the broken pieces of her life to make something she can call her own and be proud of.

I am not a quilter. I'm fascinated by patterns and mosaics, but the sewing part of the equation has kept me from diving in. However, I did live with a dedicated quilter for a while, and watching her piece together those beautiful quilts was fascinating and humbling. Making something beautiful and functional from scraps is a wonderful ...

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Read-Alikes

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