This book takes place generations after the last book which makes it both an outlier of the five books and a hell of a lot more confusing than it need be. As it has been generations, the stories of the first four novels have become legends and the legends have become myth and are religious in their overtone.
I was pleased however that Shedemi, the character I came to love over the last two books remained alive in the cloak of the Starmaster spending hundreds of years asleep and waking up to tend her garden of earth. Shedemi has finally decided that she needs to return to the planet and participate in life again, she can no longer remain solely as the gardener of earth. Her humanity has decided that she needs to interact with people and so she opens a school and causes all sorts of chaos.
This book was better than The Ships of Earth, but again I feel as if five books was a bit much for this story. It could easily have been split into two separate trilogies, but it wasn’t so we get the somewhat disjointed story through the first four novels and what appears to be a fifth book which may be completely unrelated.
Of the three novels so far, this was my least favorite. It dealt mostly with the journey from Basilica to the original ships that brought humans to the planet of Harmony. It was bogged down in details of the travel and the minor arguments between the main characters.
In the second installment of Orson Scott Card’s five book series Homecoming we pick up right where The Memory of Earth left off. This time however we are not solely focused on the Wetchik clan, instead we learn about a new character Moohz, a great Gorayni general. Although the Gorayni worship differently, they still worship the Oversoul, but call it God. As we delve more into his story we learn his people were conquered and annihilated by the Gorayni and he is biding his time until he is able to strike a death-blow to the Gorayni empire and their leader, a self-titled human manifestation of god.
Personal politics aside, I actually enjoyed this novel. It was fantasy enough that the science-fiction didn’t beat me over the head, similar to some of the Irene Radford I’ve read in the past (The Stargods) but less of a struggle. It must come naturally to Card to blend these similar yet distinct genres