There was so much to like about this book, it was very, very close to a five-star read.I'll need to think a bit more before writing a review.*************Okay, I am back to review this. Sadly, I have already read two other books since this one, and I know I won't be able to remember it in as good of detail as I would have liked.They Tell Me of a Home is about the "prodigal" son, Thomas Lee, of an abusive father and a downright cruel and unloving mother. TL spends his childhood being rejected by his mother and beaten by his father. His only solace is found within books and from the mentoring of his small-town one room schoolhouse teacher.As soon as he can, TL escapes and heads to college. It takes him ten years to workup to going back home. But, he knows he must, even subconsciously, in order to find some closure. When he left, he was a child, when he comes back, he hopes to be a man.What was very touching about this book is how it portrayed poor southern black farmers. The scenes at the meeting tree were very poignant, and had me longing for that sense of connection with those around me. These families where almost no one reads or has education - but they all believe education is the "way out". Sadly, it also makes them feel inferior, and therefore resentful, when anyone does leave and become educated. So, TL is simultaneously lauded for being educated and looked down upon for being educated, i.e. better than everyone else.I don't want to give away the book, but there are some passages that were very well written, Time doesn't heal old scars; it just makes them bearable.More than anything, we were a family of people who despised our own blackness and complained incessantly about never having enough. Not until I went to college did I understand how hair relaxers and skin lighteners reinforced a self-perception of ugliness.Western society does not teach men to love women. It teaches men to love what women can do.Phrases like 'boys will be boys', spoken by mothers across the world, are simply another way of saying boys will be allowed parameters girls won't get.Daniel Black, in the voice of TL, captures exactly the pain and anguish of trying to break past the patterns that have been carried down in black families, the conflicts of self-hatred and pride. He explores how TL left his family never planning to come back, and when he did go home he had to face everything he thought he knew, but with an adults view, rather than how he left, which a child's view. TL gets more than he bargained for, but finds out he didn't know everything he thought he did. Admittedly, TL had a lot of pride to deal with.The only reason this was not a five-star read was because the end was just a touch too quick for me.
I don't know if I'm just getting more sentimental in my older age (wink, wink) or if Daniel Black just has a way of evoking such strong emotions into his characters, that I feel as though he's speaking directly to me. Obviously, that's a sign of a dynamic writer, which he is. This book was so outstanding, I don't even know where to begin.T.L. Tyson goes home because he was summoned there by an invisible force so strong, he couldn't ignore it--and, for good reason. Once he gets home, he is plagued with the questions of why his family was so different than everyone else's family appeared to be? Why didn't they communicate? Why didn't they love one another? Why did his father beat him and abuse him mentally, and why didn't his mother nurture him and give him praise for being such a smart young man? T.L. thought about all those things on his 3 mile walk to Swamp Creek, Arkansas.Once he got home and settled in, what he did learn on his journey of learning about his past, stunned him, and will stun you the reader. This story is about family, loss and moving forward. What an outstanding read! I guarantee you, you will not be able to put this one down! Written by one of my favorite authors!
What do You think about They Tell Me Of A Home (2006)?
Well, I've certainly had mixed feelings about this book. At first, I enjoyed it. Midway through, I was seriously ready to leave it. Towards the end, I enjoyed it again. Here is what I loved: Some of the stories told during the Friday evening gatherings "under the Tree" made me laugh so hard I couldn't breathe. Also the notion that no person's motives are rarely just black or white, but complicated with various shades of gray and other stuff is surely reinforced here. In addition, this book validates the "gift" of being a teacher. ("Teaching is not a profession, T.L. It is a spirtual calling.God has ordained some people with the skill to excite the rest of us about learning.")As a retired teacher, I felt this spiritual calling. I just decided I don't want to write about what I didn't like about this book. Since it left me with so many positive messages, I think I want to just relish them. In conclusion, while this is not one of my favorite books, I am very glad to have spent time in Swamp Creek.
—Trudy
I have always been a reader. A lover of books. A love I inherited from my mother. I loved (and love) the feeling of being transplanted into whatever world I happened to be reading about. However, NEVER have I EVER read any book that moved me to so many emotional highs and lows. My senses were constantly yanked from one emotion to another, and in rapid speed! Every single chapter was an emotional and tumulus roller coaster, dipping and swinging around curves I never saw coming. The lives of these characters had me LITERALLY laughing out loud one moment, then crying or wiping away tears the next. I read of acts by characters that made me audibly gasp in shock at what they had done in one line and then felt my heart break at their despair in the next. I've been pulled into books before. Good authors should be able to do that, to literally draw you into that world that they've created and have you see it as real. But I've never been visible or emotionally moved by any book, until now.
—Cileane
Well, I finished reading it, and enjoyed doing so in a bemused kind of way. The protagonist, TJ, has just got his Phd in black studies and has returned unannounced for a visit to the rural Arkansas town he left a decade before. Some of the dialect was fun to read and flowed well, but it seemed like when not writing in dialect, Black wrote dialogue very awkwardly - I was always being surprised when in the midst of what I thought was a conversation in a normal tone of voice he would write "I screamed," or "I whined," or "I hollered." Also lots of weird digressions inserting chunks of factoids about black history or strange theorizing about race, family, and gender (and I mean really, really strange theorizing on the latter).
—Emmkay
