Toni Morrison - Home

Reviewed live on bookshow by Maggie Perkovich 8th August 2013

I read a review of this book, about the Korean war and the black soldiers who having fought
in the war were then discharged with little honour or thanks.
But when I actually read this book, it meandered along until two thirds of the way, changed tack
and ended up in a different place as it were.
The main story is of Frank a discharged soldier who is having a traumatic time relating to the
real world. This is also 1953, so black citizens had no rights. Some towns made it obvious that
"coloured" were not welcome.Frank himself hits the bottle to drown the memories of war, death
and the shooting of a young girl. He had joined up with friends from home to get away from his
town named Lotus which he hated. His parents worked all the time to survive and the grandmother
Leonore looked after them, but cruelly and his sister knicknamed Cee left home early to run off
with a no gooder who dumped her when they ran out of money.
He is trying to stop drinking helped by some good people when he gets a message about
his sister, "come soon, or she dead".
Cee is working for a Doctor and his wife, who seem kind and expect little of her in way of
housework, but by the time Frank arrives back in Lotus Cee is almost dead due to the
doctor and his strange experiments on her body!!!
This is what I mean, after spending a long time trying to understand Frank's problems,
we are then chucked into a different trauma altogether with Cee (Ycidra was her real name).
I couldn't really say I enjoyed this book, although the author has a good pedigree, she
won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, National Book Critics Circle award, and a Pulitzer
prize for fiction. She doesn't get the Perkovic Good Book Award from me!!!Maggie Perkovic.