YorkshireCarer's review of Take Me Home

A first book by this author, who is a lecturer in English at Loughborough University.

I’m not really a fan of ‘carer’ books – being a carer for 21 years I tend to read crime fiction (escapism I suppose from my everyday role) so I didn’t know what to expect – a technical or perhaps sugar-coated account of how caring affects the family concerned.

What I found was a frank, humorous and sometimes brutal account of the Taylor family – their father’s declining health and the knock-on effect it had on every member of the family, mainly their son Jonathan the author.

His recollections made me laugh and cry at the same time – the childhood memories of holidays in the Isle of Man, games they played with their father before the illness took hold, the frustrations of their father, once a headmaster, who could no longer recognise his family and the link between their father’s previous medical history and how that ultimately mirrored itself in his Parkinson’s and Dementia.

I also found the background to their father, John Taylor, fascinating - his fragmented childhood, a first marriage which the children from his second marriage had no knowledge of and the subsequent reunion with one of his children from his first marriage gave depth to the book and as the reader, made me question how our upbringing shapes our future lives in a way I’d not considered before.

Whether you care for someone with a similar illness or not, you can relate to the scenarios described in the book – how parent and child roles are often reversed, the frustrations of not being able to get the care and support you need from the authorities and the pseudo-relief when the person you care for is finally out of pain and the emptiness of being left behind.