Menu
Bottom of the pile
20
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
6/100Critics
35/100Scholars
Author:
Rebecca Mead
Publisher:
Knopf
Date:
February 8, 2022
A reflection on the complicated nature of home and homeland, and the heartache and adventure of leaving an adopted country in order to return to your native land.
What The Reviewers Say
[A] timely and powerful read. I suspect I won’t be the only one: This far beyond the looking glass, does anyone feel like they know their way home?.
Mead continues to zigzag through time by replaying her years starting out as a journalist in New York and tracing her parents' histories. Her non-linear approach never disorientates — rather, it invigorates, creating as it does a rich patchwork of overlapping ideas and recollections. Only occasionally are Mead's ruminations too ponderous for their own good.
A book is justified by its quality, not its subject. Home/Land...does not falter by virtue of belonging to the reviled species of memoir; rather, it flails because it is insufficiently interested in the external world. Despite its many arresting images and diverting anecdotes, it reads like a very smart person’s very well-written diary.
Her regrets? Her reliefs? These questions, and more, are asked and answered in penetrating detail by a writer who pans for gold and presents it many times, albeit in sentences that are long and somewhat convoluted.
