Aug 14

Aug 14 The Road Home

Author: Rose Tremain
Publisher: Little, Brown (US edition, 2008)
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

In the wake of factory closings and his beloved wife's death, Lev is on his way from Eastern Europe to London, seeking work to support his mother and his little daughter. After a spell of homelessness, he finds a job in the kitchen of a posh restaurant, and a room in the house of an appealing Irishman who has also lost his family. Never mind that Lev must sleep in a bunk bed surrounded by plastic toys — he has found a friend and shelter. However constricted his life in England remains he compensates by daydreaming of home, by having an affair with a younger restaurant worker (and dodging the attentions of other women), and by trading gossip and ambitions via cell phone with his hilarious old friend Rudi who, dreaming of the wealthy West, lives largely for his battered Chevrolet.

Homesickness dogs Lev, not only for nostalgic reasons, but because he doesn't belong, body or soul, to his new country-but can he really go home again? Rose Tremain's prodigious talents as a prose writer are on full display in The Road Home, but her novel never loses sight of what is truly important in the lives we lead.

TL;DR Review

The Road Home is a beautifully written about immigration and building a better life. I liked it.

For you if: You love a character-driven novel about both struggle and hope.

Full Review

I read The Road Home by Rose Tremain as part of the #ReadingWomen challenge. It won the Women’s Prize in 2008.

The Road Home is about Lev, a widower from a small village in an unnamed Eastern European country. He leaves his daughter in the care of his mother and moves to London to find work and send money home. We follow him from the beginning of that journey through hope and heartbreak as he tries to build a better life.

This is kind of a strange book to review. There were a few things I didn't love, like how the accents of characters of certain races were spelled phonetically in their speech while Lev's accent wasn't. But mostly, I have pretty much nothing against it, and there were some really beautiful writing moments. I rooted hard for Lev, despite his occasionally bad treatment of people (in fact, I thought these moments made him very real and round and were rooted in trauma, even though I was quite angry with him).

There is so much here about belonging, and picking yourself up by the bootstraps, and rage, and struggle, and hope, and family.

So I didn't dislike this book by any means. But I also don't have a strong love for it, either. It was just a good story, well written. I saw that someone added it to a list on Goodreads called "the most mediocre books of all time" lol — I would NOT go that far, but it just didn't sing to me.

I'm not sure that's a helpful review, lol, but there you have it.