The Journey Home

Portraits of Healing

By: Gabriel Bron

Narrated by: Charles Hubbell

Length: 8 hrs and 31 mins

Publisher's summary

The Journey Home is a novel narrated through 35 engaging vignettes involving a son’s relationship with his parents during their final year of life. Using amplified recollections vivid dreams, and impressionistic flashbacks, The Journey Home leads the listener on an amazing pilgrimage of discovery and healing.

Starting with the onset of his mother’s Alzheimer’s and proceeding through the eventual admission of both his parents to a nursing home, The Journey Home explores the complex and intimate process of evolving relationship in the final passage of life.

Immersing the listener in the experience of caring for someone facing physical decline and dementia, this heartfelt story offers encouragement for all caregivers. Told with the imagination and humor, each vignette invites the listener to understand the bittersweet emotions that are part of grieving and healing. Through making honest connections with the past and present, the Journey narrative demonstrates how life-altering challenges can be faced with openness, dignity, and grace.

©2021 Michael Rost (P)2021 Michael Rost

Enchanting narration of a personal journey

The Journey Home is an engaging guide through a son's "letting go" of his parents – as they fade in their final years of life. At the same time, it is an energizing, inspiring journey of self-discovery, as the author rediscovers strands of personal, family, and cultural history in this process of understanding the inevitable passage of relationships. Though the story itself is a genre-being delight (it includes full-color images to introduce each episode), the audio narration is a work of art. The reader/listener is captivated and embraced by the soft tones of the narrator, and the music that bookends each chapter adds another emotional layer to the story. Highly recommend the audible version – you can listen to one episode at a time and feel transformed. Five stars!

Wasn't going to Review at First

I met the author at an online seminar this year. His work in applied linguistics was informative and easy to read (a rare gem in the field), so I wanted to know more about the person behind the words. It's not often in linguistics that we get to know the background of people who teach us, so I took this chance. Also, I lost my parents at a young age and can relate to the topic of the book. The author is lucky that he had loving, intelligent, and caring parents who lived a long time.

About the book: Honestly, until the last few chapters, I liked everyone except the author. He was crass and his jokes were inappropriate. He calls himself "one of the best in his field." This author should take notes from Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography were he never once boasted about himself, only others, and rarely used the word "I" unless it served a purpose. Franklin only mentions his greatest achievement in the back of the index and it's because his son pressured him to do it.

The worst part about the line mentioned is when it's said the reader doesn't actually know what his field is because he hadn't mentioned it yet. Little time is spent building his character's history except that he was in Africa and Japan for some reason. You can't expect readers to assume you're a linguist because you knew a few languages and lived in other countries. It's eventually mentioned he's a linguist, but that's about halfway through the book. Not only did the line mentioned rub me the wrong way, a few other opinions he had did, too. There's a lot in this book that should've been cut out before it was published and it was mostly lines that made the author irritating. We're all human though and he grew on me. Plus, I respect the person behind the book a lot. Kate was my favorite person in the book. And the author tells you outright that she's the real hero. He really honors his siblings and family in this book.

Also, Charles Hubbell does a great job reading The Journey Home. My only nitpick is he sounded cheerful at times that weren't meant to be cheerful moments. His female voices are creepy. Yet, I'm guessing it's a struggle for people in his career to do opposite gender voices. That said, he read the last few chapters as if he were the author. This person is a TRUE voice actor.