Homebound

A GMA Book Club Pick: A Novel

De: Portia Elan

Narrado por: Lisa Flanagan, Helen Laser, Yu-Li Alice Shen, Nancy Wu

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK • A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • In a dazzling ode to human inventiveness and the desire for meaning, four lives are entangled across time by one unfinished story, saved to a floppy disk in the 1980s and destined to ripple across the centuries.

“A joy...and a hauntingly beautiful exploration of what makes us human. It kept me up all night!” —MADELINE MILLER, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Song of Achilles

"A big, bold, ecstatic world—full of heart and wonder.” —RUTH OZEKI, New York Times bestselling author of A Tale for the Time Being

1983. Becks is nineteen, blasting her Walkman, and hiding from the fact that her beloved uncle, and the only person who understood her, is dead. Luckily, he left her a half-finished video game to complete—one last collaboration to find her way out of loneliness.

2078. Dr. Portman works at the intersection of artificial intelligence and robotics, wrestling with her responsibility to Earth's precarious future. But increasingly, it seems an exceptional project may transcend everything she believed to be possible...

2586. After decades of life on the sea, Yesiko knows a scavenger's work is rife with moral compromise. Yet when a long-lost piece of technology walks aboard her ship, she is set on a path toward a sacrifice even she may be unwilling to make.

Linking these women across the centuries is a chain reaction of love, longing, and creativity that reveals our deep interconnectedness. Clear-eyed and hopeful, Homebound imagines how future generations will find meaning in the things we leave behind.

Beautiful storytelling

A quiet and powerful journey to self realization and what it means to find family.

Beautiful, imaginative, joyous

Great performance of a beautiful book about love and loss and friendship and exploration and sailing and cats and dreams and prophecies. How to find and choose your family. A meditation on trust and love and betrayal. Whales are here, yes, and robots, but also punk music and self proclaimed dykes. Family that disappoints, family that leaves, family that stays and family that becomes your family. Loved this. 5 stars for beauty. 5 stars for heart. 5 stars for the reflection of your face in the face of a robot who is also a person—lost, hopeful, and moving forwards.

Development of main character

Flashbacks difficult at first but
I caught on to understand logic
Worth the effort Insightful

3 stories of family you make

It took awhile but I enjoyed the stories, the building of the 3 threads. The narrators took some getting used to.

terrible narration

there are 4 narrators to this book and two of them are horrible. One leaned way too hard into sounding like a robot. It was completely disengaging and annoying. The other narrator had this deep gutteral stage whisper that always sounded out of breath. It was so uncomfortable to listen to. This might be a good book if you read it instead of listening to it, but the audio of it made the different stories feel very disconnected and unpleasant. I couldn't wait to finish it.