Homecoming
Cynthia Voigt (1981)
“Four children are abandoned in a parking lot by their mother and walk two hundred miles down the Connecticut coast to find a home — and discover that home is not a place but a choice.”
At a Glance
Thirteen-year-old Dicey Tillerman and her three younger siblings — James, Maybeth, and Sammy — are abandoned by their mentally ill mother in a shopping mall parking lot in Peewauket, Connecticut. With almost no money and no adult help, Dicey leads them on a journey south toward Bridgeport, where their Aunt Cilla lives. When Aunt Cilla turns out to be dead, they are taken in by her daughter Eunice, a rigid, joyless woman. Dicey realizes Eunice's home will crush them. She leads the children further south to Crisfield, Maryland, where their grandmother Abigail Tillerman lives alone on a rundown farm. Gram is fierce, independent, and suspicious of attachment — but the children need her, and she needs them. The novel ends with Gram agreeing to take them in.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Homecoming and its sequel Dicey's Song are among the most celebrated children's novels of the twentieth century. The Tillerman cycle — seven novels — defined a new standard for psychological complexity in children's literature. Homecoming was a Newbery Honor Book (1982), and Dicey's Song won the Newbery Medal (1983). The novels demonstrated that children's fiction could address abandonment, mental illness, poverty, and institutional failure without condescension or false resolution.
Diction Profile
Deliberately informal — a child's perspective rendered in clean, unadorned prose
Very low