Sing them home - Kallos, Stephanie
Summary: 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.
Booklist Reviews
Things are swept away by tornados in Emlyn Springs, Nebraska: pianos, houses, and a young girl and her mother. Although the young girl, Bonnie Jones, is eventually recovered, her mother, Aneira Hope Jones, never resurfaces. The painful circumstances surrounding their mother s death leave the Jones children, Larken, Gaelen, and Bonnie (henceforth christened Flying Girl), emotionally stunted and struggling to learn how to love. Years later, when another natural disaster draws them together, the three are confronted by the clouded past that has haunted them since childhood. In multiple ways, it is the community members of Emlyn Springs who teach these motherless children how to love again. Sing Them Home ushers us into small-town life, with all its distinctive cultural nuances, eccentric personalities, and homegrown secrets. With the same beauty and lyricism of her first novel, Broken for You (2004), Kallos stitches together a colorful patchwork of memories and images, creating a rich narrative fabric that develops and changes as it passes through each character s hands. Copyright Booklist Reviews 2008.
Check Availability
