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Book Reviewed by: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.
Chapter One
They rose up like men. We saw them. Like men they stood.
We shouldn’t have been anywhere near that place. Like most farmland outside Lotus, Georgia, this one here had plenty of scary warning signs. The threats hung from wire mesh fences with wooden stakes every fifty or so feet. But when we saw a crawl space that some animal had dug—a coyote maybe, or a coon dog—we couldn’t resist. Just kids we were. The grass was shoulder high for her and waist high for me so, looking out for snakes, we crawled through it on our bellies. The reward was worth the harm grass juice and clouds of gnats did to our eyes, because there right in front of us, about fifty yards off, they stood like men. Their raised hooves crashing and striking, their manes tossing back from wild white eyes. They bit each other like dogs but when they stood, reared up on their hind legs, their forelegs around the withers of the other, we held our breath in wonder. One was rust-colored, the ...
Claudia feels her and Frieda’s sorrow for Pecola’s predicament “was the more intense because nobody else seemed to share it.” Why do you think others in the town were less than sympathetic to her to Pecola's situation? Why did no one offer to help?
It did make an impression on me, but I was a pretty resilient kid. I knew that my parents loved my sister and me, gave us a good and safe home, only wanted the best for us, and that was enough. Obviously, it did change that 13 year old girl's life and I've always wondered what happened to her. I ...
-Lana_Maskus
What role does social class play in the novel? What do you see as some of the results of the upward striving Claudia describes?
Social class is everything in this novel. Each social class looks down on the strata below it. The Breedloves are seen as scum. The mother believes that she elevates herself by working in the home of white people and caring for their child, but has no qualms about sacrificing Pecola.
-Lana_Maskus
Morrison says of the women who move from the South: “[T]hese girls soak up the juice of their home towns, and it never leaves them.” What do you suppose she means? Do you agree? Do you feel you're someone who “soaked up the juice” of your home town?
"You can take the boy/girl out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy/girl" is a saying for a reason. We are all shaped as children by our environments; home and community, in both positive and negative ways. Neighborliness, work ethic, community spirit are positives that c...
-Lana_Maskus
The title of the novel refers to Pecola's intense desire for blue eyes. How do you feel racial self-loathing corrodes the lives of Pecola and her parents? How does this manifest itself in characters like Maureen Peal, Geraldine, and Soaphead Church?
The Breedloves lived in a storefront because they were poor and black and they believed they were ugly. They had this conviction and did nothing to show love or to inspire self-love or confidence in their children. Pauline and Cholly fell in love and moved north to Ohio for a better life. Pauline...
-Sylvia_L
Frieda loves her dolls while Claudia preferred to dismantle them. Did you play with dolls as a child, or were you more of the “dismantling” type?
As a Black child, I was not interested in receiving white dolls. I gave them hair cuts ad may have dismantle some cheap plastic ones. They weren't dolls I wanted to nurture or give name. I wanted a black doll baby (which I gave her my middle name) or black Barbie dolls as (Christie, Julia, Brad) ...
-Tonyia_R
Pecola approaches Soaphead about obtaining blue eyes. Why do you think the author included this story? How would it have been different, in your opinion, if it had been relayed from Pecola’s point of view rather than Soaphead’s?
@Joyce_Montague I do think that Soaphead used her to poison the dog. There's another instance where someone uses Pecola to injure (and maybe kill?) at cat. I'd love to know what Morrison's thoughts were about this scene. Morrison did say that she tried to use different narrative techniques to hel...
-kim.kovacs
What book(s) are you excited to read in 2025?
I'm looking forward to reading The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison Medgar & Myrlie by Joy-Ann Reid Home and Away by Rocelle Alers The Women by Kristen Hannah Sky Full of Elephants by Cebo Campbell Lovely One by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson These reads should take me to Spring!
-Joyce_Montague
"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)
(Reviewed by Beverly Melven).
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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It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm - a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two young men return from the war to work the land. It is the unlikely friendship of these brothers-in-arms that drives this powerful novel to its ...
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