Category: Book Reviews

Home by Toni Morrison
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

**spoiler alert** Toni Morrison’s novella, Home, depicts Frank Money’s challenging journey of self-acceptance and self-forgiveness upon his return from the Korean War, while at the same time highlighting the socio-economic and racial issues with which he and his family are forced to face and overcome. Morrison opens Home with a scene just outside of Lotus, Georgia, in which Frank and his younger sister Cee accidentally stumble across and witness the burial of a body that still “quivered” (Morrison, Home). The only part of the body they can see is described by Frank as a, “black foot with its creamy pink and mud-streaked sole being whacked into the grave” (Morrison, Home). Initially, it is their curiosity that leads them into the field where they watch two horses fighting when suddenly, they unwittingly find themselves trapped as involuntary spectators to a gruesome burial. The event would haunt Frank for years to come and unbeknownst to him, would play an important role in his ability to accept and forgive himself after his return from the Korean War.

Frank, a black man, had experienced his family being forced from their home in Bandera County, Texas, at the age of four, “Twenty-four hours, they were told, or else. ‘Else’ meaning ‘die’” (Morrison, Home). The Money family, with nowhere else to go, winds up in Lotus, and moves into his Grandmother, Lenore’s, home. Frank and his family live with his Grandparents in Lotus until he decides to enlist as a young man. Much to the disappointment of Cee, and with no hope for advancement or options for self-improvement in Lotus, Frank enlists. He tells Cee, “Lotus was suffocating, killing him and his two best friends” (Morrison, Home).

During his time in the Korean War, Frank experiences the unforgettable loss of his two closest friends from Lotus, with whom he had enlisted. He also experiences shooting a young Korean girl for what he describes as “tempting” (Morrison, Home) him. Unable to accept or admit that it was he who had shot her, he initially tells the story depicting himself solely as a spectator who watches his “relief guard” (Morrison, Home) shoot her. His inability to accept his own unspeakable actions causes him to, “cover his guilt and shame with big-time mourning for his dead buddies” (Morrison, Home). He admits this cowardly behavior directly to the reader in chapters fourteen and fifteen. He justifies his actions by saying, “How could I let her live after she took me down to a place I didn’t know was in me?” (Morrison, Home).

Upon his return from the Korean War, Frank is institutionalized in a mental hospital from which he subsequently escapes after receiving word that Cee’s life is in danger. Without fully understanding the type of danger she is in, Frank makes it his sole goal and purpose to return to Georgia and save her. Struggling to deal with his relentless symptoms of post-traumatic stress that are wreaking havoc in every aspect of his life, he finds a much-welcomed and renewed purpose in his drive to save his sister.

After saving Cee from Dr. Beauregard Scott’s experimental table in Georgia, Morrison cleverly closes Home with a scene that takes us full-circle on Frank’s journey. The scene is of Frank and Cee unearthing the bones of the same body they watched buried years before in the field just outside of Lotus, only to give it a proper burial alongside the river in the first quilt that Cee had ever made.

Like many of Toni Morrison’s works, Home is filled with scenes and dialogue that effortlessly portray the effects of racial and socio-economic oppression as well as the challenges and struggles endured to overcome them. Through her use of Frank as the main character, Morrison is able to make his journey the reader’s journey. It becomes personal and we feel what Frank feels when she writes, “There were very few passengers, yet Frank dutifully sat in the last seat,” (Morrison, Home). Home is set in a time when racial equality did not exist and as Frank put it, “You could be inside, living in your own house for years, and still, men with or without badges but always with guns could force you, your family, your neighbors to pack up and move—with or without shoes” (Morrison, Home). This thread is continuous throughout Frank’s journey in the book and is highlighted at nearly each and every interaction he has with other characters along the way.

Typical of her writing style, Morrison provides her characters with seemingly insurmountable challenges but also provides them with the tools, and more importantly a glimmer of hope, necessary to overcome those challenges. In Home, Morrison provides that tool in the form of a sense of community, whether it is the willingness of Frank’s grandparents to take the Money family in after being displaced from their home, or the unwavering determination displayed by the women who through their selfless caregiving efforts, successfully facilitate Cee’s full recovery.

The book is a quick and easy read and Frank’s character makes it easy for us to cling to him and follow throughout. While Frank’s character is well developed, most of the other characters’ development is lacking. This does not in any way take away from Morrison’s effectiveness with telling Frank’s story, the story of a black man who through many personal trials and tribulations was eventually able to acknowledge and accept his own imperfections on his way to becoming a man. It took him years, but finally after returning home to Lotus, and just like the sign that Frank nailed on the tree after he and Cee reburied the body that they so long ago watched buried in horror said, “Here Stands A Man” (Morrison, Home). Frank had come full circle and become a man.

I felt the book did a good job at keeping me attentive and interested. This was due to Morrison’s lyrical writing style and the short chapters that quickened the pace. I also enjoyed and welcomed how some chapters were simply and completely nothing more than Frank’s thoughts. Oftentimes these thoughts were enlightening admissions of the inaccuracies or omissions being written about him up to that point in the story. Initially, these moments of clarity and sometimes challenges for the author caught me off guard but then I started to look forward to them and the channel of honesty Morrison was providing Frank through their use. I thought it was a clever and refreshing way to keep the story honest and to share what really happened with the reader.

If you haven’t read Morrison’s novella Home, I would recommend it to anyone interested in a quick and easy read that provides an honest look into the socio-economic and racial oppression faced by one black man during his personal journey of self-acceptance and self-forgiveness during the Korean War era.

James

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Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

**spoiler alert** Barbara Kingsolver’s book, Flight Behavior, provides her with a familiar and Appalachian-inspired canvas from which to convey her passionate concerns for the effects of global warming and climate change. She does this through the use of her main character, Dellarobia Turnbow’s, unexpected run-in with a huge mass of monarch butterflies while walking up a mountain on her way to act upon her urge to go outside of her marriage with another man after becoming severely bored and unhappy with her life’s circumstances. Not wearing her glasses, she’s unable to determine what the swarm of monarchs is and turns back taking it as a heavenly sign that what she is doing is wrong. Returning to her family, she becomes aware of her father-in-law’s plans to sign a logging contract that will allow the same trees upon which the monarch butterflies have become dependent, to be cut down. Hearing about the monarch phenomenon, Ovid, a scientist who has been researching and studying monarchs for years, comes to the Turnbow’s land to monitor the butterflies and attempt to determine what might be the cause for their highly unusual choice of roosting place in the southern Appalachians. Feeling that there must be some higher purpose for the butterflies alighting on her family’s property, Dellarobia’s curiosity gets the better of her and she soon finds herself assisting Ovid and his team of student-scientists with their time-sensitive mission to collect as much data as possible before the impending winter, threatening to wipe the monarchs out, arrives. During the time she assists with studying the monarchs, Dellarobia begins to question everything in earnest. Her exposure to Ovid and his team only intensifies her longing to be something other than what she has become and to be somewhere other than where she is. She finds herself drawn to Ovid and admires his passion for his work and how learned he is. Over time, she begins to realize that she made a mistake in marrying Cub, her husband, simply because she had gotten pregnant at seventeen. Her impulse to free herself from what she now realizes to be a self-imposed situation, becomes too strong to ignore. Finally, just like the monarch butterflies veering off course in the Appalachians, she reaches a point where she can no longer remain static and held hostage by her circumstances and spreads her wings in flight, moving into an apartment of her own. Kingsolver ends Flight Behavior with a scene in which Dellarobia looks to the sky and watches the monarchs fly away to “a new earth” (Kingsolver, Flight Behavior).

Flight Behavior demonstrates and further solidifies Kingsolver’s widely known passion for issues surrounding global warming and climate change. Much of the dialogue in the book focuses around these issues and while they provide Dellarobia an education of sorts, they also encourage and inspire her (and hopefully readers) to become more aware and proactive in the struggle to curtail global warming. Flight Behavior touches on the loss of polar ice and the coral reefs, shrinking glaciers, droughts, diminishing numbers of fish in the ocean, lowering one’s carbon footprint, using less fossil fuel, reducing one’s red meat intake, driving less or using a bicycle, the use of energy efficient appliances, flying less, etc., all of which are very relevant to the issues we face today. Kingsolver warns us as to the seriousness of our continued disregard for climate change with Ovid’s explanation to Dellarobia, “It will only take a few degrees of change, global average, to knock our kind out of the running” (Kingsolver, Flight Behavior). It’s very clear that Flight Behavior is written as a warning and with the intent of waking us up to the realities of climate change and global warming that we now face.

Kingsolver brings Flight Behavior to life through her use of detailed and vivid imagery. She consistently and determinedly provides exquisite details on each and every scene throughout the book, “It was practically nothing, a fleck of orange wobbling above the trees. It crossed overhead and drifted to the left, where the hill dropped steeply from the trail” (Kingsolver, Flight Behavior). Her ability to create imagery through the use of intimate and specific details effectively draws the reader into the book’s scenes.

Flight Behavior also demonstrates Kingsolver’s uncanny ability to write the way people actually talk. She clearly draws upon her own Appalachian background and by not holding back, she keeps things real. As in real life, she creates characters who are not always tactful and who can be blunt and to the point. Being from Kentucky myself, I appreciated this and oftentimes laughed aloud when reading things like, “You looked bookoo hot” (Kingsolver, Flight Behavior). This aspect of Kingsolver’s writing style enables her characters and the interactions amongst them to come across as very authentic.

One of the more-noticeable themes Kingsolver uses in Flight Behavior is the different ways people within Dellarobia’s community chose to interpret the circumstances surrounding the monarch butterflies. The initial tendency of many was to somehow link it to religion or to view it as the work of a higher power. As is often the case when a phenomenon occurs that is seemingly unexplainable, people tried to say it had to be of God’s hand, “Why a major portion of the monarch population that has overwintered in Mexico since God set it loose there, as you say, would instead aggregate in the southern Appalachians, for the first time in recorded history, on the farm of family Turnbow” (Kingsolver, Flight Behavior). This continued to be the case with many of the locals even after Ovid and his team of student-scientists began to more fully understand and explain what was actually happening. Kingsolver does a good job carrying this theme throughout the book’s entirety and even portrays some of the characters, such as Dellarobia’s mother-in-law Hester, as a noted and always on, god-fearing character.

While a little long-winded at times, Kingsolver’s book, Flight Behavior, is an interesting and inspirational story from which we can all learn something. Kingsolver not only provides us the story of Dellarobia’s liberating journey, she also provides the parallel story of the monarch butterflies with the more important purpose of highlighting the effects of global warning and climate change.

I would recommend Barbara Kingsolver’s book, Flight Behavior, to anyone interested in the issues surround global warming and climate change but also who enjoy reading a good story. I would also recommend the book to those not yet convinced of the realities and effects of global warming and climate change.

James

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