I find that most of the reviewers of Home have missed the point that was most important to me.
I loved Gilead but I found this follow up to be disappointing because, despite many reviewers comments to the contrary, there is little grace portrayed in this family, little redemption, and almost no learning or character developed through the story's end. Rather than seeing the book as a treatment of spiritual themes, I experienced it as limited to religious themes, questions of theology and abstract principles that somehow never cross into the actual issues of daily life that the protagonists wrestle with.
The "old man" is completely tactless at healing his family's wounds, although he is obsessed with the task above all else in his life. He never understands the simplest lessons of forgiveness although he can talk all day about it. Glory's miserable fate at the book's end makes me want to grab her by the collar and shake her, because she has absolutely no will to live her own life. I can't sympathize with her plight because she has early on resigned her responsibility for herself.
And what are we to learn from Jack? He can be very nice, but he seems to be missing some fundamental human quality, something basic to citizenship, to family membership. He makes attempts, trying to establish contact and respect with Ames, learning to respect his family's needs and his obligations to them, but when put to any real test, he dissolves. He and his father agree that somehow he's never felt at home, like he belongs in or to his family, yet what good comes from this acknowledgment? If there is no redemption, no lesson possible here, then the reader can hope that Jack and his family can go on with their lives without wallowing in the unjustice of it all, the pathos of their fate, and not let it destroy them. Apparently they can't.
Overall, this doesn't convey spiritual principles, it doesn't give uplift, and it leaves a hollow moral bankruptcy and helplessness as an aftertaste.