Let’s Read: Homecoming

*A note about my reviews. I don’t give away plot or details. I never want to spoil a good book! Also I like to tell you something I loved and something to be aware of in each review I do.*

Homecoming

By: Kate Morton 

I love the way Morton weaves us through her stories. This book is a dual timeline with multiple characters speaking.

We start with Isabel in 1959 preparing for a party. The setting is a giant old house she lived in with sprawling land and hot Australian landscape in a small made-up country town of Tambilla.

Right off the bat, Morton drops a few tidbits that tell us an inciting incident is about to happen.

Next, we learn of Jess in 2018 living in London. Although her home growing up has been with her grandmother Nora who lives in Australia.

These storylines slowly converge. But this is the beauty of how Kate Morton takes us through her stories. Her writing always has me trying to unravel the mystery. It often has me asking what the deeper mystery might be. There is another layer we don’t know yet. It always makes me want to keep reading to connect her dots and tie the story together.

With each of these storylines and characters we see inside their lives twisted with family dynamics, secrets kept and some revealed. All this plays together to create a mystery that we as the reader want to untangle.

Why did Nora hold so fiercely to her secrets? What was Isabel’s state of mind those early days? We want to know who was in the forest the day tragedy struck. We want to know how these characters are connected and what secrets died long ago. Which secrets we can still find the threads of truth to help us unravel the mystery.

 Something I loved: I am a lover of descriptive writing. Kate Morton writes with such beauty of the landscape and the sounds and sights of the Australian countryside. I have never been there, but I could picture what the old gum trees might look like or the sound of the fairy wrens flitting about. I also love what her writing does for my mind as I travel along in her story. I think I have a theory of who did what, but it changes as she slowly delivers new information. By the end I am surprised in ways I didn’t expect. Not in a who-dunnit I had no idea kind of way, but in a slowly evolving mystery that sheds light and truth on how we as humans live and move around in the world.

Something to be aware of: There is talk of suicide in the storyline as well as children being harmed.