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Narrated by:
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Toni Morrison
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By:
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Toni Morrison
About this listen
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.
©2012 Toni Morrison (P)2012 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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-
-
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- By Robert C Purnell on 02-01-22
By: Toni Morrison, and others
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The River Why
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- Narrated by: Dick Hill
- Length: 15 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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MORRISON AT HER MOST COMPLEX
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Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh north. Despite his distaste for dealing in "flesh," he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, "with the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady." Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, but later from a handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved.
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Great book
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Performance
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Story
In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe’s wife, Violet, attacks the girl’s corpse. This novel “transforms a familiar refrain of jilted love into a bold, sustaining time of self-knowledge and discovery. Its rhythms are infectious” (People).
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The audio is not the same as the book
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Tar Baby
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Jadine Childs is a Black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a Black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between Blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women.
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So good that I'm writing my first Audible review!
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The Bluest Eye
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It is the story of 11-year-old Pecola Breedlove--a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others--who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
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Beloved
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Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.
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Author-read Books
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Playing in the Dark
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Overall
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Performance
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Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires. According to the Chicago Tribune, Morrison "reimagines and remaps the possibility of America." Her brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition.
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My goodness..get ready to be challenged
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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
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Performance
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Story
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perfection
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East of Eden
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
This sprawling and often brutal novel, set in the rich farmlands of California's Salinas Valley, follows the intertwined destinies of two families - the Trasks and the Hamiltons - whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.
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Why have I avoided this Beautiful Book???
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
It's just a small story really, about, among other things, a girl, some words, an accordionist, some fanatical Germans, a Jewish fist-fighter, and quite a lot of thievery. Set during World War II in Germany, Markus Zusak's groundbreaking new novel is the story of Liesel Meminger, a foster girl living outside of Munich. Liesel scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can't resist: books.
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Glad I took a chance.
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Critic reviews
Featured Article: The Essential Works of Toni Morrison
Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison left behind a legacy of powerful books. These are her most essential listens. In August 2019, we lost a giant of the literary world. Toni Morrison died at the age of 88, leaving behind a decades-long legacy of remarkable writing and achievements. She was one of a few American authors whose work has had an indelible impact on readers and writers everywhere. Toni Morrison’s books are essential listening for anyone who wants to study American literature or experience books filled with powerful storytelling and brilliant prose.
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Paradise
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- Length: 15 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local “powhitetrash.” At eight years old, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age - and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. But years later, she learns about love for herself and the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors.
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Nel and Sula's devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal—or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald and tragic, Sula is a work that overflows with life.
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filthy language and violent content
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- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
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In Paradise - her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature - Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of "the one all-black town worth the pain", assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town's ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void.
-
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MORRISON AT HER MOST COMPLEX
- By Kennedi Hill on 11-07-19
By: Toni Morrison
-
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
- By: Maya Angelou
- Narrated by: Maya Angelou
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local “powhitetrash.” At eight years old, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age - and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. But years later, she learns about love for herself and the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors.
-
-
Emotional & Powerful
- By Miss Toni on 06-30-13
By: Maya Angelou
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Sula
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 5 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Nel and Sula's devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal—or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald and tragic, Sula is a work that overflows with life.
-
-
Good against evil and a riotous story to boot
- By Karen on 04-11-11
By: Toni Morrison
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The Plague of Doves
- By: Louise Erdrich
- Narrated by: Peter Francis James, Kathleen McInerney
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
The unsolved murder of a farm family haunts the small, white, off-reservation town of Pluto, North Dakota. The vengeance exacted for this crime and the subsequent distortions of truth transform the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation and shape the passions of both communities for the next generation.
-
-
Avoid this Plague
- By Andre on 05-16-08
By: Louise Erdrich
-
This Side of the Sky
- By: Elyse Singleton
- Narrated by: Myra Taylor, Sharon Washington, Richard Ferrone
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
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Performance
-
Story
Award-winning journalist Elyse Singleton delivers what Essence calls “a gem - the perfect book to curl up with.”
Best friends Lilian and Myraleen, two African American women from rural Mississippi, travel to Europe during World War II to act as members of the Women’s Army Corps. During this time of segregation and destruction, both women discover love and heartbreak, triumph and defeat.
-
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A Breath of Fresh Air
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By: Elyse Singleton
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Rush Home Road
- By: Lori Lansens
- Narrated by: Ruby Dee
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When a 70-year-old woman finds a five-year-old girl abandoned on her doorstep, she is thrust into a sorrowful past that can only be conquered with the help of the girl who opened her memory - the very girl she is trying to save. This first novel, according to author Jacquelyn Mitchard, is one of "exquisite power, honesty, and conviction...quite nearly without flaws."
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filthy language and violent content
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Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules (Unabridged Selections)
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Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules is a collection of short stories, some classic, others impending, selected and introduced by David Sedaris.
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During the Great Depression, Jeb Nubey is running from the law when he meets three abandoned children. With nowhere else to go the group passes a stormy night in a comforting church. When they are discovered, a case of mistaken identity ensues. It seems the congregation has been waiting for their new pastor, a widower with three kids. Looks like more trouble for Jeb. Yet the chance for a steady job and three squares a day is too good to turn down.
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Lala Reyes’ grandmother is descended from a family of renowned rebozo, or shawl-makers. The striped (caramelo) is the most beautiful of all, and the one that makes its way, like the family history it has come to represent, into Lala’s possession. The novel opens with the Reyes’ annual car trip - a caravan overflowing with children, laughter, and quarrels - from Chicago to “the other side”, Mexico City. It is there, each year, that Lala hears her family’s stories, separating the truth from the “healthy lies” that have ricocheted from one generation to the next.
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Love, family, history, and fantasy, Caramelo
- By Michele on 08-07-20
By: Sandra Cisneros
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Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
- By: Allan Gurganus
- Narrated by: Barbara McCulloh
- Length: 49 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Allan Gurganus's Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All became an instant classic upon its publication. Critics and fans alike fell in love with the voice of 99-year-old Confederate widow Lucy Marsden, one of the most entertaining and loquacious heroines in American literature. Lucy married at the turn of the 20th century, when she was 15 and her husband was 50. If Colonel William Marsden was a veteran of the "War for Southern Independence", Lucy became a "veteran of the veteran" with a unique perspective on Southern history and Southern manhood.
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Dated.
- By edie butler on 04-06-21
By: Allan Gurganus
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Gathering of Waters
- By: Bernice L. McFadden
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 6 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Gathering of Waters is a deeply engrossing tale narrated by the town of Money, Mississippi - a site both significant and infamous in our collective story as a nation. Money is personified in this haunting story, which chronicles its troubled history following the arrival of the Hilson and Bryant families. Tass Hilson and Emmett Till were young and in love when Emmett was brutally murdered in 1955. Anxious to escape the town, Tass marries Maximillian May and relocates to Detroit
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Loved it!!
- By Naima on 07-26-16
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The Twelve-Mile Straight
- A Novel
- By: Eleanor Henderson
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 17 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Cotton County, Georgia, 1930: In a house full of secrets, two babies - one light-skinned, the other dark - are born to Elma Jesup, a white sharecropper's daughter. Accused of her rape, field hand Genus Jackson is lynched and dragged behind a truck down the Twelve-Mile Straight, the road to the nearby town. In the aftermath, the farm's inhabitants are forced to contend with their complicity in a series of events that left a man dead and a family irrevocably fractured.
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Great read!
- By S. Clay on 11-01-17
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Memphis
- A Novel
- By: Tara M. Stringfellow
- Narrated by: Karen Murray, Adenrele Ojo, Tara Stringfellow
- Length: 9 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Summer 1995: Ten-year-old Joan, her mother, and her younger sister flee her father’s explosive temper and seek refuge at her mother’s ancestral home in Memphis. This is not the first time violence has altered the course of the family’s trajectory. Half a century earlier, Joan’s grandfather built this majestic house in the historic Black neighborhood of Douglass—only to be lynched days after becoming the first Black detective in the city. Joan tries to settle into her new life, but family secrets cast a longer shadow than any of them expected.
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Awful narrator
- By Rachael edwards on 06-07-22
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Rabbit, Run
- By: John Updike
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 12 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Rabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his - or any other - generation. Its hero is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is 26 years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual gratification and family duty - even, in a sense, human hard-heartedness, and divine Grace. Though his flight from home traces a zigzag of evasion, he holds to the faith that he is on the right path.
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A Thinking Man's Novel
- By L. Berlyne on 01-12-09
By: John Updike
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Mudbound
- By: Hillary Jordan
- Narrated by: Ezra Knight, Kate Forbes, Joseph Collins, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Hillary Jordan's mesmerizing debut novel won the Bellwether Prize for fiction. A powerful piece of Southern literature, Mudbound takes on prejudice in its myriad forms on a Mississippi Delta farm in 1946. City girl Laura McAllen attempts to raise her family despite questionable decisions made by her husband. Tensions continue to rise when her brother-in-law and the son of a family of sharecroppers both return from WWII as changed men bearing the scars of combat.
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May this South never rise again.
- By Betty on 03-25-12
By: Hillary Jordan
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Miss Lonelyhearts
- By: Nathanael West
- Narrated by: L. J. Ganser, Kevin Pariseau
- Length: 2 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Miss Lonelyhearts is an unnamed male newspaper columnist writing an advice column, which is viewed by the newspaper as a joke. As "Miss Lonelyhearts" reads letters from desperate New Yorkers, he feels terribly burdened and falls into a cycle of deep depression, accompanied by heavy drinking and occasional barfights. The novel is essentially a black comedy and is characterized by an extremely dark but clever sense of humor and irony.
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Charged with Meaning, and Far Leftist Leaning
- By W Perry Hall on 01-27-16
By: Nathanael West
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Breakfast at Tiffany's
- By: Truman Capote
- Narrated by: Michael C. Hall
- Length: 2 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Golden Globe-winning actor Michael C. Hall (Six Feet Under) performs Truman Capote's masterstroke about a young writer's charmed fascination with his unorthodox neighbor, the "American geisha" Holly Golightly. Holly - a World War II-era society girl in her late teens - survives via socialization, attending parties and restaurants with men from the wealthy upper class who also provide her with money and expensive gifts. Over the course of the novella, the seemingly shallow Holly slowly opens up to the curious protagonist.
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"Better to look at the sky than live there"
- By W Perry Hall on 02-12-14
By: Truman Capote
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In this 1983 short story - the only short story Morrison ever wrote - we meet Twyla and Roberta, who have known each other since they were eight years old and spent four months together as roommates in St. Bonaventure shelter. Inseparable then, they lose touch as they grow older, only later to find each other again at a diner, a grocery store, and again at a protest. Seemingly at opposite ends of every problem, and at each other's throats each time they meet, the two women still cannot deny the deep bond their shared experience has forged between them.
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Read the introduction last
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The Source of Self-Regard
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Arguably the most celebrated and revered writer of our time now gives us a new nonfiction collection - a rich gathering of her essays, speeches, and meditations on society, culture, and art, spanning four decades.
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Refreshing thoughts
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The Bluest Eye
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It is the story of 11-year-old Pecola Breedlove--a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others--who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
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Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.
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Author-read Books
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Kate has always been a wanderer. A well-published author, married many times, she has lived a life rich with explorations of the natural world and the human soul. Now, at fifty-seven, she leaves her lover, Yolo, to embark on a new excursion, one that begins on the Colorado River, proceeds through the past, and flows, inexorably, into the future. As Yolo begins his own parallel voyage, Kate encounters celibates and lovers, shamans and snakes, memories of family disaster and marital discord, and emerges at a place where nothing remains but love.
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Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick is an outstanding collection of stories about love and migration, gender and class, racism and sexism that proudly reflect African-American folk culture. Brought together for the first time in one volume, they include eight of Hurston’s "lost" Harlem stories, which were found in forgotten periodicals and archives. These stories challenge conceptions of Hurston as an author of rural fiction and include gems that flash with her biting, satiric humor, as well as more serious tales.
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The author of Song of Solomon now sets her extraordinary novelistic powers on a striking new course. Tar Baby, audacious and hypnotic, is masterful in its mingling of tones—of longing and alarm, of urbanity and a primal, mythic force in which the landscape itself becomes animate, alive with a wild, dark complicity in the fates of the people whose drama unfolds. It is a novel suffused with a tense and passionate inquiry, revealing a whole spectrum of emotions underlying the relationships between black men and women, white men and women, and black and white people.
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Son Finding
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Barracoon
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In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview 86-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo's firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage 50 years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States. In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from Mobile.
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skip the introduction!
- By Earin on 10-16-18
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
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Their Eyes Were Watching God, an American classic, is the luminous and haunting novel about Janie Crawford, a Southern Black woman in the 1930s, whose journey from a free-spirited girl to a woman of independence and substance has inspired writers and readers for close to 70 years.
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perfection
- By Mel on 04-06-15
What listeners say about Home
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Bob
- 06-18-12
A Must Read for our children and all
What did you love best about Home?
May I skip the ?, have trouble writing that way, thanks. I am reading this for many reasons, I love the author, have followed her for years. I am a white man, I have twelve grand kids and eight of them are children of color. In many ways a blended family.I am making sure my kids read this book and have their children read it as well. It is a painful story we all need to meditate on and act. I have been a community organizer like my president and a pastor in the African American Community for most of my parish life. Terri's characters are real, I sometimes think as I am reading, I met this person, she has such a wonderful way to make you feel you are part of the story. Following the soldier has been hard. I read one chapter at a time, I find that helpful for my experience, which keep barging in, and because his life is so hard and so real to me. I have friends who are dancing all over about the book"Work" or something like that. I am not, this book makes me shout for freedom and justice and dance a jig of sorrow and grace.Maybe to wax like a poet that I am, you might say Terri has called me "Home"when you are called home, it is importantit often is life changing, and isthe journey home is always hard, long, and often painfulyet at home there is a strange kind of love there, all embracing.Terri I am coming home, thanks for the call!ko shin, Bob Hanson, a Warrior Poetin the middle of a revolutionary state, Wisconsin
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- Kaui
- 07-12-12
wonderful read - lyrical!
1993 Nobel Prize. A taut precisely written novel about Frank Money, an African-American Korean War veteran fighting insanity (PTS) whilst working his way back to his sister Cee in their home in Alabama. Many locks fit his key – why? Frank’s and Cee’s travels are at once heart-wrenching and universal. This book was more accessible than Beloved.
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2 people found this helpful
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- judith
- 06-30-12
It's OK
Story ok, but less than I expected. Difficult to listen to Toni Morrison for any length of time. Her voice is clear, as is her enunciation. But it is S_L_O_W. I needed her to move on, I found myself impatient. I'd rather draw my own conclusions of characters' moods, etc., from the writing --- not from the author's/reader's insistence on setting it.
Still, I like to keep up with Morrison's work, so I'm glad I listened to it. But this is one book I'd probably have enjoyed more by reading it at my own pace.
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- Syd Young
- 10-22-12
Home -- For Your BookClub or Classroom, or Brain!
Would you consider the audio edition of Home to be better than the print version?
Both are excellent. I listened first, then went and read it in order to study it and learn from a master.
Who was your favorite character and why?
Cee, she learns to stand tall and believe in herself regardless of her childhood and the wrong done to her.
Which scene was your favorite?
Hard to pick, but three come to mind. First, the opening poem, it brings chills down the spine. Next, when Cee tells Frank that she has a right to cry. And finally, the ending poem and all its potential meanings. I'll give you the first just so you don't miss it on the audio version:
“Whose house is this?
Whose night keeps out the light
In here? Say, who owns this house?
It’s not mine. I dreamed another, sweeter, brighter
With a view of lakes crossed in painted boats;
Of fields wide as arms open for me.
This house is strange. Its shadows lie.
Say, tell me, why does its lock fit my key?”
I don't know about you, but this resonates deep within me. It's the story of growing up, of finding yourself. Of finding out that home, for good or bad, has made a lasting impression on you, and, just maybe, you can reconcile yourself with that. Perhaps, on a grander scale, it is also a reconciliation to the awareness and owning of our country, good and bad.
Finally, perhaps you can reconcile yourself with you, good and bad
Any additional comments?
I love the book for the imagery of the time that it invokes, and for the depth of each character that the author gives us. I love the use of many literary styles, and the fact that the book is still very accessible. I love the ending.
Here is the low down:
Frank is a Korean vet who was treated equally in the war but slips back into segregated America as it if it is still the norm, which is a good subtle shock for the modern reader, so far away from it. But Frank has bigger worries, mainly that he is haunted by the war. This book is the story of his quest to find his sister, and during his travels he finds himself. This is a very American theme, in the fashion of Mark Twain and Charles Frazier (Cold Mountain). Frank breaks through and speaks to the reader, and occasionally to the author; this is a highly effective, somewhat twisted, way to jar the reader out of the story itself and into deeper thought. Toni Morrison is skilled enough to pull it off.
Cee (Ycidra) is Frank's sister, who thinks that maybe she'd have learned to think for herself if Frank hadn't been there to constantly protect her. She is an accident waiting to happen, a consummate victim, although she doesn't try to be, so trouble finds her when Frank leaves for the war. She and Frank bind each other to this earth, and eventually save each other, once they learn their own self worth. Something in that reminds me of Celie in the Color Purple, and Cee's story is very much an American girl coming of age story, with the honest portrayal of the plight of the black woman.
There are other memorable characters, some snapshots, some deeper, and plenty of themes, all delivered in a punch at 160 pages on my Kindle. Morrison trueists don't like this book very much because it doesn't use the magical realism style that they all love. If that includes you, know that this is American realism fiction, and take the time to think deeper than the story. Ask yourself how the author is so talented to make us care in such a short time. Look at the wording and sentences, and see how she shows rather than tells. Search for all those little details that make the writing so good. Learn from a living legend, who makes you dissatisfied with the humdrum.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Kellee M. Lyons
- 12-11-12
Good Read!
I enjoyed this novel for the simple fact that is was written by Toni Morrison and read by Toni Morrison. I had to speed up the narrator though because she is a slow reader. I really enjoy her novels and this one did not disappoint. It isn't my favorite Morrison book, but it was a good story!
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1 person found this helpful
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- Doris Lacroix
- 07-09-12
Author should not read their own works
Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?
Not the best use of my time as the monotone voice of the reader did nothing to enhance the story. I would have preferred to read the book myself.
How could the performance have been better?
Another actor reading would have brought more life to the story.
If this book were a movie would you go see it?
No
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2 people found this helpful
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- Trisha
- 12-19-12
Stick to a physical book
I found the story and characters interesting and engaging. I would have rated the book much higher if it had been narrated by someone other than the author. Ms. Morrison wove an interesting story but her narration was monotone and she sounded bored. It was often difficult to hear or understand what she was saying. I will confine my future adventures into Toni Morrison's work will be in a physical book or e-book - especially if she chooses to narrate her own work again.
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- Rhone Fraser, Ph.D.
- 05-24-16
Hearing "Home" by Morrison.
The audio underscores the poetry but the dialogues in it need more animation. I highly recommend hearing this audiobook. What I understood more this third time learning this story was the necessity of Frank confronting his own emotions including shame of murdering a Korean girl who was foraging and prostituting herself for survival. Very relevant to the shame that the working class has to pay for making a living in an imperialist economy. -RF.
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- Melinda
- 06-14-12
not a novel, but a collection of short stories
I adore Tori Morrison. Beloved is my favorite book of all time. I read A Mercy (her last book) when it came out in hard cover and it was just a mess. It was surprising to me that Ms. Morrison would write such a disjointed book. However, I am reviewing _Home_ and while it is a lovely collection of short, unrelated stories, I was expecting a novel. Nowhere in the description does it say it is short stories. So... if you love Morrison's way of putting words together (and that's what I'm letting myself concentrate on as I listen for the second time) and her reading voice (she doesn't "act". She just reads)...but the feeling is so intimate that I feel like a sweet fairy godmother is reading to me. But, some people don't like that and have complained.
If you like short stories (I'm not a big fan) and you have enjoyed Morrison's books in the past, then you may like this one. Her language is just spectacular and I don't regret spending a credit on such a short book.
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13 people found this helpful
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- Jean
- 07-09-12
Toni Morrison Does it again
What did you love best about Home?
I loved the language of the book, the natural flow and the way it was a story, a love story about our relationship with our families and how this love can bring us to peace and healing.
Who was your favorite character and why?
The brother, who needed to forget his pain in order to help his sister, He needed to forgive Himself and raise himself to life to save her.
Which scene was your favorite?
The opening scene giving you a mystery to make you want to read the book. Who were the men? Who was the man buried? Was it real?
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
when the brother came to get his sister from the Dr's house, and take her to the women in Lotus Georgia ,who he knew could save her.
Any additional comments?
The way we remember things. How we cope with life in order to survive. How even when we are given love we tend to be suspicious. But when we open up our hearts are filled.
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