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Well I have to say that I was a bit disappointed in this one. I suppose because I started the book expecting to read a horror book, and I had high hopes because of the author, maybe I was setting myself up for disappointment from the beginning.

What we have is a tame ghost story that is really more of a love story than anything. It is about the pain of loss, and trying to do the right thing.

The book is well written, although there were some things that just seemed to be extra padding and unnecessary for the story. Kind of like a movie that still needs to be edited.

But the plot was good and the characters were interesting. Don Lark is a man who has lost everything. When his baby girl dies due to the negligence of her mother, his ex-wife, he is devastated. He deals with his loss by isolating himself. The way that he goes about isolating himself is by purchasing old run down houses and restoring them into beautiful homes, which he then sells. When he purchased the Bellamy house and moves in to begin renovations, he encounters a couple of odd old ladies who live next door and warn him that the house is no good and needs to be destroyed. He also comes across a homeless girl who seems to have taken up residence in the old house and has no where else to go. So he let's her stay as he lives in and works on the old house. These characters all come together as the history of the old house unfolds and Don learns that some houses have their own power.

The first 2/3 of the book is really getting to know Don, while the action happens in the last 1/3 of the the book. There are times when the story drags, but overall it is well written and a solid story.

First off, I agree with Wendy: Homebody is not a horror novel. In my 1998 review, I called it a "romantic ghost story." That's accurate, so far as it goes; but as with the best of Orson Scott Card, it defies genre classification. Homebody is simply (simply!) a well-written and engaging story.

What follows is the review I wrote, when this novel was first published, in 1998:

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This romantic ghost story relies on a familiar horror backbone: a stranger with a tragic past moves into an old house that also has a tragic past, and is forced to reckon with the supernatural forces that dwell there. In Homebody, the stranger is an itinerant architect-builder who makes a lonely living by purchasing fixer-uppers, renovating them, and selling them. The house he buys in Greensboro, North Carolina, (where Orson Scott Card lives, in real life) has three mysteries attached to it: a tunnel in the basement, an attractive female squatter who refuses to leave, and a trio of weird doomsayers who live next door.

Card has a clear, well-honed writing style, full of human warmth--a style that is especially effective in the development of the central character, and in details of tools and techniques for renovating an old house. His approach to murder, danger, and threatening forces is so free of closeness or oppression, one might call it "anti-gothic." In a recent interview, he said, "I am completely uninterested in exploring 'evil.' Evil (and weak and wicked) people are all evil (or weak, or wicked) in the same boring ways. But good people are infinitely interesting in the ways they manage to be good despite all the awful circumstances of their lives."

Homebody is a pleasant tale about the triumph of love over evil, with a couple of bizarre twists to give it spice.

(TIP: If you go looking for more opinions, beware of the Kirkus Review: it has bad spoilers. For this one, you want the plot to be a surprise.)


--Fiona
My Bookshelf
(which has a lot of yummy
stuff, but not this book)