MADreads

What the wind can do

November 4th, 2009 Lisa - Central

If you like big rambly family stories, Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos is just that.  It takes place in Emlyn Springs, Nebraska, a town of people of Welsh descent, where the Jones family lives - a place smack dab in the middle of tornado country.  As a matter of fact, the reader learns early in the story that Hope, mother of Larken, Gaelan and Bonnie, “went up” in a tornado and never came down.  Bonnie herself was carried away by the tornado, but was deposited in the top of a tree.  The storm was the defining moment in the lives of those children, each of them reacting in their unique way which we learn when we meet them 25 years later.

When their dad, Llewelyn, the town physician, is killed by a lightning strike, the family comes together to bury him.  They are forced by the town’s Welsh tradition, to spend a week with their community, not speaking, but singing their dad into the next world.  The funeral also reunites them with their dad’s mistress of many years, Viney, who had also been Hope’s best friend and the children’s de facto mother.

Larken is the oldest sister, a respected professor of art history in Lincoln, who is overweight and pretty much obsessed with food.  She carries on an almost-inappropriate friendship with the married man who lives upstairs from her.  She babysits often for his daughter Esme, and eavesdrops on the arguments of Esme’s parents.  Gaelan is a very fit and good looking weatherman for the Lincoln television station.  But he is not a meteorologist; that presents a problem as a young, pretty and ambitious one gets a job at his station.  He pretty much sleeps with any attractive woman he can, which gets him in trouble with said meteorologist.  And Bonnie, the youngest daughter - who was with her mother right before the tornado struck - works part time at her smoothie stand, but spends most of her time combing the local area for remnants; odds and ends she finds on the ground.  She treats them as treasured objects, going so far as to make scrapbooks and art pieces with them.  She lives in a garage.

We hear from all these characters and learn through their voices their back stories and hopes and traumas.  Included are excerpts from Hope’s diary so we get to learn a lot about her too.  There are many secrets to be discovered here and a wonderfully - maybe predictably - wrapped-up resolution where everyone (but poor Llewelyn) ends up getting what they want, need and love.  It was a pleasure to read this charming, witty novel.

Entry Filed under: Literary Fiction, Recreational Fiction