Consider This Home

I just read this book. I found it at the library covered in dust. It took me three days to read it once I started I could not stop I stayed up until after 3:00 in the morning. i even took it to work with me. The story of Kath her son and her really bizarre family makes me realize that my family is not so bad after all. Thi would make a great movie. Someone tell Hollywood.

Greg Bills' novel Consider This Home explores what makes a home and a family within the context of late 20th Century Mormon Utah. The answers are unexpected and seldom reached easily - indeed, the stakes in this book are high ones: fidelity, faith, life, death. Some characters in this book long for the past, where, they seem to suggest, everything was simpler and everyone had his or her place. Bill's novel challenges that interpretation of the past and presents a a terrifying but ultimately affirming vision of the present which is neither Mormon nor heathen, gay nor straight. But what happens? A single mother, raising her young son in glitzy Las Vegas gets a phone at work. Amid the sounds of the casino, her aunt's voice tells her, "Come home. Your father's got the gun out." And we're off. Bills shifts between the points of view with ease and story unfolds masterfully and with surprising suspense.

I was led to this book by the author's second, FEARFUL SYMMETRY, which was one of my favorite books of '96. Why has this author received no attention? Consider This Home is the story of a ten-year-old Mormon boy, Daron, and his mother, Kath, a rather blank woman in her twenties who works as a cashier in a Vegas casino. How Kath and Daron came to the City of Sin from the small Southern Utah of Sterling is revealed when a crisis at her parents' house draws Kath and Daron back to Sterling, to Kath's ex-husband Skunk and the gay father of her child, Tom. Mormons are so weird! There's an actual angel in this book, and it's not exactly Raphaelesque. To say anymore would be a crime, the plot is so interesting--but I will say that Bills's prose style, as it is in his new book, is balm to my jaded senses. I was also particularly impressed by how he handles the point-of-view of Daron, one of the most believable children in fiction I've come across. Did I say already that Mormons are weird? Honey, they TRIPPIN'! I particularly liked his description of Pioneer Day--oh, you'll have to read it to find it. I cannot give justice to this book in this review--I can just recommend you read it. Peace.