From Abraham to Dante, it seems as if there is a secret desire in many of us to go home again. This accounts for our seeking things from our childhood, visiting places that we now see are outdated, but visit again to relive the way that we felt when we were younger. As many of you know I grew up in a home filled with books and perhaps my love of books is a way for me to go home again. When a book comes out from an author who’s first book moved me to tears, and the book is titled “Home” then I knew I needed to read it.

It is just as good as its predecessor, Gilead, the story of an older minister writing to his young son whom he knows he will not live to teach the lessons of life. Home ( Home by Marilynne Robinson if you click on this to purchase the book I get a few pennies from Amazon, Thanks) takes place in Gilead again and has such beautiful prose as to bring you back to that house in which you grew up.

When Glory returns home to stay with her aging father who lives alone since his wife and her mother died she sees the old house and thinks: “More frequently since his wife died he spoke of the house as if it were an old wife, beautiful for every comfort it had offered, every grace through all the long years. It was a beauty that would not be apparent to every eye. . . ‘Such times you had!’ her father said, as if the present slight desolation were confetti and candy wrappers left after the passing of some glorious parade.” I don’t know about you, but I grew up in an old wooden frame house that this passage brings back to me with such clarity that it is almost painful.

One day Glory’s father and another older and retired minister friend are playing checkers.and they laugh hysterically at a story from their seminary days. “The joke seemed to be that they were very young and now they were very old, and that they had been the same day after day and were somehow at the end of it all so utterly changed.”

You don’t get writing like that from many people. Some novels are plot driven and some are character driven and some just float along as if on a magic feather of words that transform the story from the page to our memory. These stories, few and far between, remind us of who we are and of who we ought to be; more than that, these great stories remind us of who we will be one day.

Looking for the New City and the Perfect Kingdom,

DrSamLam