As a card-carrying member of the Dead Dad Club, I figured I’d lean into the grief spiral this year and crank the dial to 11 by reading Rachel Joyce’s The Homemade God just in time for Father’s Day. Call it masochism. Call it catharsis. Either way, it hit like a glass of red wine thrown at a family dinner—messy, emotional, and weirdly satisfying.
Vic Kemp is a world-famous painter, no, not the edgy, avant-garde type, but the sort whose work ends up laminated on placemats and postcards in tourist shops. He’s recognizable, even if he’s not exactly revered. Vic raised four kids—Netta, Susan, Goose (short for Gustav, naturally), and Iris—on his own after his wife died giving birth to the youngest. And somehow, despite the trauma, the egos, and the lingering scent of turpentine, the family has survived. Kind of.
At 76, Vic is still living like a charming, selfish hurricane. When he invites all four children to a dinner with “big news,” they brace for drama. And boy, does he deliver: he’s in love. She’s 27. They met online. And they’re getting married. Congrats?
The kids, predictably, spiral. They ghost him. Assume it’ll blow over like his last impulsive stunt or last affair. Except this time, Vic vanishes to the family’s villa in Italy… and then dies. Found in the reeds of a lake like a Renaissance tragedy... John Everett Millais "Ophelia"....as a 76-year-old man.
Cue the sibling trip to Italy, equal parts grief, suspicion, and passive-aggressive wine-fueled resentment. They're not just recovering Vic’s body; they’re confronting Bella-Mae, the mysterious widow. And also? Each other. Because when the homemade god falls, what happens to the fragile altars his kids built around him?
This was my first time reading Rachel Joyce’s writing, and honestly? I devoured it. Every petty, poignant, hilarious, heartbreaking moment. This isn’t just a mystery, it’s a full-on family reckoning wrapped in sun-scorched prose and garnished with grief, bitterness, and a splash of limoncello. The characters are messy. Netta plays the martyr-mother. Susan bristles in her shadow. Goose cracks under the weight of artistic legacy. Iris, forever the baby, drifts through it all like a half-formed memory.
And Vic? The absent-present father, worshipped and resented in equal measure. The man. The myth. The mess.
In the end, The Homemade God painfully and beautifully reminds us that even our gods were just people, messy, flawed, sometimes infuriating people, just like us.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.