Sing Them Home; A Novel

New York, New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2009. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Good/Good. [12], 542, [6] pages. Includes Prologue; Epilogue; and Acknowledgments. Some damp stains at top of some back pages. DJ has some wear and scratches. Stephanie Kallos was born in Idaho and grew up in Nebraska. Before coming out of the closet as a writer, she had a varied work history which included many years as a musician and a long career in the theater as an actress and teacher of voice, speech, and dialects. Her short fiction has received two Raymond Carver Awards and a Pushcart Prize nomination. Her first novel, Broken for You, was published in 2004; it was chosen by Sue Monk Kidd as a "Today Show" book club selection, and received the Washington State and PNBA Book Awards. Her second novel, Sing Them Home, was published in 2009; a Pacific NW Independent Booksellers bestseller, it was selected for Iowa's "All Iowa Reads" program and named by Entertainment Weekly as one of the 10 Best Books of 2009. Her third novel, Language Arts, was published in 2015 and was adapted as a feature film by Kairos Productions. Trafficking between the here and the hereafter is an enticing premise for fiction, rich with opportunities for the kind of deus ex machina-esque plot twists that--in the right hands--can reel a reader right in. Stephanie Kallos explores this peculiar nexus of the living and the dead in Sing Them Home, where we're introduced to the Joneses, a Nebraskan family struck twice by meteorological disaster. This book is a magnificent tapestry of lives connected and undone by tragedy, lives poised--unbeknownst to the characters themselves--for redemption. Sing Them Home is a moving portrait of three siblings who have lived in the shadow of unresolved grief since their mother's disappearance when they were children. Everyone in Emlyn Springs knows the story of Hope Jones, the physician's wife whose big dreams for their tiny town were lost along with her in the tornado of 1978. For Hope's three young children, the stability of life with their preoccupied father, and with Viney, their mother's spitfire best friend, is no match for Hope's absence. Larken, the eldest, is now an art history professor who seeks in food an answer to a less tangible hunger; Gaelan, the son, is a telegenic weatherman who devotes his life to predicting the unpredictable; and the youngest, Bonnie, is a self-proclaimed archivist who combs roadsides for clues to her mother's legacy, and permission to move on. When they're summoned home after their father's death, each sibling is forced to revisit the childhood tragedy that has defined their lives. With breathtaking lyricism, wisdom, and humor, Kallos explores the consequences of protecting those we love. Sing Them Home is a magnificent tapestry of lives connected and undone by tragedy, lives poised,unbeknownst to the characters, for redemption. Derived from a Kirkus review: Fractured when the mother is whirled away in a tornado, a Midwestern family is finally restored in this engaging saga. Like Larken Jones, one of its central characters, the novel is enormous and unrepentant. It hinges on the disappearance and presumed death of Hope Jones in 1978, leaving her three children to be brought up by their father Llwellyn in the Welsh-derived community of Emlyn Springs, Neb. As the novel opens decades later, Llwellyn is killed by a lightning strike while playing golf, forcing the siblings, each damaged in his or her own way by the loss of their mother, to reassemble. Larken, a professor of art history, defends herself with food and her love for Esmé, a neighbor's child; TV weatherman Gaelan prefers casual sex and bodybuilding; eccentric, virginal Bonnie collects random items of trash. Kallos employs extracts from Hope's diaries and the perspectives of various characters, including Llwellyn's long-term mistress Viney, to expose with wit, whimsy and inexhaustible detail the secrets of the past and developments of the present. The narrative eventually reaches resolutions to the problems of all: Larken and Esmé (and Esmé's father) become a family; Bonnie has the child she craves with Blind Tom the piano tuner; and Gaelan is reunited with his first love. Useful, grounding glimpses of a darker world of betrayal and anguish in a censorious, narrow-minded community are easily crowded out by the emphasis on quirk and charm. Intelligence and spirit sustain this epic.