Home Front by Kristin Hannah
Summary (from the publisher): The blockbuster bestselling author of Night Road and Firefly Lane delivers a masterful novel that explores the sacrifices of one American family and illuminates the true cost of honor, duty, and love.
From a distance, Michael and Joleen Zarkades seem to have it all: a solid marriage, two exciting careers, and children they adore. But after twelve years together, the couple has lost their way; they are unhappy and edging toward divorce. Then the Iraq war starts. An unexpected deployment will tear their already fragile family apart, sending one of them deep into harm's way and leaving the other at home, waiting for news. When the worst happens, each must face their darkest fear and fight for the future of their family.
An intimate look at the inner landscape of a disintegrating marriage and a dramatic exploration of the price of war on a single American family, Kristin Hannah's Home Front is a provocative and timely portrait of hope, honor, loss, forgiveness, and the elusive nature of love.
Review: On the surface, this is about the struggles a family endures when their mother Jolene is deployed to Iraq. But it is also a moving portrait of a struggling marriage. And it is also about the mental load wives and mothers carry in the home that often goes unnoticed.
It's wild what it takes to get a man to step up at home. In this case, it was his wife literally being sent to war to get Michael to take a more active parental role. I sympathize with the fact that Michael has a stressful and demanding job and was grieving the loss of his father, but he was a pretty terrible husband and father in the first part of this book and Jolene gives him grace over and over. I liked his evolution and growth in this book, but I honestly had pretty little respect for him early on, not least of which was due to how disrespectful he was towards Jolene's military career.
The plot of this surprised me! I don't want to give away any spoilers, but I was expecting a different outcome from Jolene's deployment than what actually happened. But I did love the choices the author made.
Thematically, this reminded me greatly of Firefly Lane: both focus heavily on mother daughter relationships (especially the tortured nature of them during adolescence), marital tension, and absent mothers. I know she's a moody and hormonal teenager, but Betsy was the worst! She is constantly yelling at her mother, stomping off, and complaining incessantly. Of course it is natural to have big feelings at that age, but there was no reprieve from her bad behavior. It just would have been nice if we could have had at least small glimpses of kindness or love for her mother in between the storms.
This book was a little too long but wonderful on audio and was really different from a lot of family stories I have read. I loved the light Hannah cast on the war in Iraq, female members in the military, and PTSD. The audiobook included a brief interview with the author, and I loved hearing how researched for this book, which included an interview with a helicopter pilot and attending a deployment ceremony.
Stars: 4
Related Titles:
Comments
Post a Comment