The Homemade God by Rachel Joyce
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I love Rachel Joyce. I love her rich and three-dimensional characters. I love her immersive stories. I love how when you finish her novel, you are left with a feeling of being full after a delicious meal. The Homemade God is full of adult children whose lives are stunted because they have continually revolved around their father.
Their father who marries a very young woman that none of them have met and dies soon after. Now they travel to Italy to figure out what happened, who this woman is, and how their father died. And they each come undone one by one. The time on the island changes each of them in irrevocable ways. This is a story about family, and the roles we can slip into and stay stuck in for a long, long time. The hold our parents can have on us. The pieces of ourself that we give up along the way, never to realize how much of it we’ve sacrificed.
It’s a beautiful story, beautifully told. That I grew to love each of those unlikable characters serves as a testament to the powerful storytelling and character building talent of Joyce.
with gratitude to netgalley and The Dial Press for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review
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