Consider This Home [Hardcover]

Greg Bills (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 10, 1994

Kath and her young son, Daron, return home to their Mormon family to resolve difficult, potentially violent past issues, including their feelings about Daron's homosexual father and the Mormon husband Kath abandoned. A first novel. 15,000 first printing.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Bills's masterful debut traces a deceptively relaxed, almost meandering path to a devastating conclusion that weighs despair and hope in an agonizingly fine balance. The abrupt collapse of her parents' marriage calls KathLeen and her precocious, insightful 10-year-old son Daron back from Las Vegas to the small Mormon township of her childhood, where she is forced to gather up threads of the past left dangling by her sudden departure six years before. Her hard-won independence is challenged by various confrontations: with her family; with Tom, her first lover and the father of Daron; and with her estranged husband Skunk, whose visionary religious obsessions hold out to Kath both the threat of annihilation and the possibility of redemption and spark the narrative's incendiary resolution. Kath's struggle is informed throughout by the stark colors of the Utah desert and by Mormonism, the desert religion--here presented as unforgiving and embracing, anachronistic and Utopian, parochial and millennial. Avoiding condescension and sensationalism in favor of a meticulous accumulation of telling detail, Bills leads us beneath the surface of outwardly unremarkable lives to the secret regions touched by the numinous, the terrible and the profound.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Set in modern-day Utah and Nevada, this novel tells the story of one woman's trials and tribulations among her Mormon contemporaries. Kath and her son, Daron, conceived by a homosexual man, suffer in an overly orthodox, stifling Mormon household after she returns home to help her father deal with her mother's desertion. Tom, Daron's father, and his lover, Artie, provide needed stability for Daron during this trying time. Bills's novel is ambitious, but though parts of it are well written and developed, ultimately it is disjointed and bloated. The plot is overwritten and melodramatic, and the reader will spend much time trying to figure out transitions in time, place, and voice. Bills's attempt at white-bread humor, using names like JuLee, Clovis, and PearLeen for Kath's relatives, is overdone. Librarians looking for fictional accounts about Mormons and Mormonism may want this book for public library collections. Everyone else can skip. Literary Guild selection.
- Kevin M. Roddy, Univ. of Hawaii at Hilo Lib.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; First Edition edition (March 10, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671798731
• ISBN-13: 978-0671798734
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,763,792 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Could Not Put It Down, July 7, 2000

By 

"macadocb" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Consider This Home (Hardcover)

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.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mormons, Madness, Murder: an angel looks down from a tree, December 6, 1996

By A Customer

This review is from: Consider This Home (Hardcover)

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.

4.0 out of 5 stars Learning to Let Go, October 1, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Consider This Home (Hardcover)

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.