Customer Reviews

Home Ground (King Penguin)

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An interesting glimpse into the lives of a Jewish family in Capetown, South Africa during apartheid. The family relationships were beautifully portrayed.

I saw Ms. Freed do a reading and I just had to get some of her books. Home Ground showcases her warm, witty voice. This is an engrossing story of girlhood and coming-of-age with a heroine who's a bit of a holy terror. A very good read.

Lynn Freed offers a portrait of growing up in privileged South Africa in Home Ground.

This is a loving and merciless view of a theater family made up of three parts histrionic narcissists, two parts evaders, and one part Lynn. Freed is also merciless concerning her own abuses of power in South Africa as a child, the lines she thoughtlessly steps over to explore and satisfy her drives. No excuses, just the events, leaving the reader to draw her own conclusions about the "why." The lack of justification or complaint is refreshing in a memoir.

Freed creates very real people for her readers, but just as real is her gift for conveying beautiful, exotic settings in all their fullness; the clothes, furnishings, the light, what grows outside a window, the sounds that drift in that same window.

Recommended especially for fans of Freed's novels, who will appreciate the insight into the politics of race, colonialism and gender that fuel her fiction.