There is a heatwave across Europe, and four siblings have gathered at their family's lake house to seek answers about their father, a famous artist, who recently remarried a much younger woman and decamped to Italy to finish his long-awaited masterpiece. Now he is dead. And there is no sign of his final painting. As the siblings try to piece together what happened, they spend the summer in a state of lawlessness: living under the same roof for the first time in decades, forced to confront the buried wounds they incurred as his children, and waiting for answers. Though they have always been close, the things they learn that summer—about themselves and their father—will drive them apart before they can truly understand his legacy. Meanwhile, their stepmother's enigmatic presence looms over the house. Is she the force that will finally destroy the family for good?
In The Homemade God...[Joyce] has not one but four protagonists ... This complex structure is somehow more satisfying and more frustrating to read than if she’d told the story in a more straightforward way ... Joyce has great fun in this novel ... Her descriptions of the Italian countryside are alluring ... But what makes this book so memorable is Joyce’s deep understanding of familial relationships and the stunted growth caused by a fraught upbringing.
Joyce thoughtfully mines the depths of both human frailty and resilience while playing with the passage of time and the pangs of memory ... A perceptive writer, Joyce’s wit and wordplay are fully deployed, too, creating characters that entertain as they evolve.
Moves between being a page-turning mystery and an astute study of family dynamics, and readers who like a book to pick a lane and stay in it may find this frustrating. But Joyce is a thoughtful writer, and the narrative gear-changes echo the novel’s concerns ... This is what Joyce does best ... Joyce is also exceptionally good at blending the big stuff of life with the small, showing how losing a parent is a surreal mix of gut-wrenching horror and banal admin, interspersed with hysteria and binge-drinking ... The close focus on the siblings can sometimes mean their respective partners and other secondary characters are less clearly seen, but this is a minor quibble in an otherwise sharp, absorbing and emotionally intelligent novel.
