Home Front
The story starts out with a tragedy and never really gets over it. Joleen is 17, her father is a drunk abusive man who leaves their home one night with her co-dependant mother. A paragraph later her parents are dead, car accident, and she is all alone.
Home Front
By Kirstin Hannah
Read by Meggi-Meg Reed
St. Martin’s Press & Macmillan Audio
January 2012
Flash forward to 1995. Jolene is a 41 year old mother of two and wife of successful lawyer Michael. We learn that she has survived by ignoring her hurts and putting on a brave face and joining the Army (then National Guard) to fly Blackhawks. Importantly, we find that she was made emotionally whole by the love of her life Michael. But in true Hannah fashion things get worse.
Not everything is as great as it seems – or as Jolene pretends – as her marriage seems to be a shell of its former glory and then Michael comes home one night and tells her that he no longer loves her and wants a separation. The next day, she finds that she is being sent to war in Iraq. Her marriage falling apart, her husband abandoning her emotionally, her children needing her Jolene finds herself in a situation that has no happy way out. By this point in the book, it is exceedingly clear that things are only going to get bleaker and bleaker. Frankly, it was tough to continue.
I’m not going to give away how things work out or what happens to the family or Jolene. I’m going to say this: I did finish the book and I was rocked emotionally. And that’s the draw, really, of a Kristin Hannah book. (Night Road wasn’t exactly a happy story either.) If you can stomach the deeper and deeper darkness that Jolene and her family find themselves in you may be rewarded with the slightest bit of sunlight on the horizon. Or your eyes may have become adjusted to the darkness and the light that you think you see is really just a lighter shade of gray.
Overall, it was a ride worth taking once if only for the human face that Hannah puts on war and what it does to families and soldiers. The insight into PTSD was enlightening and frightening. The young characters that so many reviewers called whiney I found spot on and realistic. How else would you expect a child to act in a situation like this? And their depiction shows yet another cost of the war. It should be enough to ask if the price is worth it; at least to get the discussion going.
A note about the audio book version: The reader, Maggi-Meg Reed, is outstanding! Her slightly gravelly, mature voice was perfect for Jolene and she did a good job with the others, even Michael and the males. I have seldom heard someone who was so spot on with emotion. When the text says that the character’s voice broke, Reed’s does. When the character cries, she cries. You could hear the emotion in her voice. One of the better readers I’ve listened to in the last year.
A tough book to finish. One that Hannah fans will love and the rest of us should probably avoid.
Scott Asher is the founder and administrator of BookGateway.com. He recieved his BA in Pastoral Ministries from Vanguard University in Southern California. His personal blog is AshertopiA – a land flowing with milk and honey… and a lot of sticky people where he cartoons and writes on Christianity, Zombies, and anything else he wants to.
