Book Review: Homecoming

There are some characters in novels that stick with you all of your life.

Do you know what I mean?

We all remember Ramona Quimby – right?

People fall in love with Harry Potter and Frodo and Lucy Pevensie.  Maybe you can’t forget Oliver Twist or that one big guy in Of Mice and Men.

I remember a girl named Dicey as if we were next door neighbors or first cousins.

She and her siblings are the main characters in a book series by Cynthia Voight.  The first novel is Homecoming and the storyline shocked me as a kid and stuck right in my gut somewhere and I’ve never forgotten the vibe and the heart of that novel – not even thirty years later.  (I used to want to name my daughter Dicey.  It didn’t happen.  But that thought was always there.)

Last week I finished rereading Homecoming (as a grown up!) because I wanted to consider it for our girls Book Club but remembered its content to be heavy and wanted to evaluate whether I thought the girls were ready for it just yet.

The story is a hard one, you guys.

Dicey and her three younger siblings live with their mom on the coast.  Their dad left them years earlier.  The novel opens with the four kids waiting in their blue station wagon in the parking lot of a mall.  It’s a hot summer day and their mom heads into the mall while the kids are instructed to listen to thirteen-year-old Dicey and stay put.

The kids wait.  And wait.  And Mom never comes out of the mall.  The abandoned kids spend one night in the station wagon and then trek it out on their own.

Of course, this story is written before cell phones and the internet.  So there’s no texting to save them and they need to use an actual phone book.

Dicey is afraid to go to the police for fear of being separated from her siblings and the kids choose to band together no matter the cost.  They have a destination in mind of the home of a grandmother they’ve never met who lives down the coast.

The novel moves along following Dicey’s stoic efforts to feed her family and meet their physical needs, while wrestling with the fall out of her mother’s abandonment and her fears of what their future holds.  The pressure on a kid of this age is immense.

There’s so much to like in this story.  So much to worry about.  So much to fear for Dicey and James and Maybeth and Sammy.

Homecoming is such a worthwhile read.

Good literature should give you a place for your own feelings to land.  Good literature should make you think and it should make you feel and it should open your eyes to the thinking and the feeling of someone else too.

I think there’s something very powerful about putting novels like this in the hands of girls like mine.

Books are safe places.  Books are about other people and other people’s lives.  You can talk about other people and other people’s lives while kind of sort of trying out feelings and thoughts of your own about your own life.  But you say it’s about Dicey and you can see how that works out in your mind and in your words.  Safe.  Talkable.

It’s why Book Club started actually.

To talk about Big Things through safe characters in safe books with beginnings, middles and ends and a hard cover that you can close when you’ve had too much.

I think Homecoming is a perfect Book Club book actually.

And I still feel just as inspired by Dicey as a forty-two year old as I did when I met her as a twelve year old.