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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Jan 2009, 560 pages
Paperback:
Sep 2009, 560 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Vy Armour
Buy This Book
The eagerly anticipated second novel from the author of Broken for You - a national best seller and selection of the Today Show Book Club - is a sweeping, gorgeously crafted family story set in the American heartland.
With her best-selling debut novel, Broken for You, Stephanie Kallos earned comparisons to John Irving, Anne Tyler, Margaret Atwood, and Carol Shields, establishing her as a writer of uncommon “wisdom and soulfulness” (Sue Monk Kidd).
Sing Them Home is a deeply moving portrait of three grown siblings who have lived in the shadow of unresolved grief since their mother’s mysterious disappearance when they were children. Everyone in Emlyn Springs, Nebraska, 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 distant, preoccupied father, and with Viney, their mother’s spitfire best friend, is no match for their mother’s absence. Larken, the eldest, is an art history professor who seeks in food an answer to a less tangible hunger; Gaelan, the only son, is a telegenic weatherman who devotes his life to predicting the unpredictable and whose profession, and all too much more, depend on his sculpted frame and ready smile; and Bonnie, the baby of the family is a self-proclaimed archivist who combs the roadsides for clues to her mother’s legacy, and permission to move on.
When, decades after their mother’s disappearance, they are summoned home after their father’s sudden death, they are forced to revisit the childhood tragedy at the center of their lives. With breathtaking lyricism, wisdom, and humor, Stephanie Kallos explores the consequences of protecting the ones we love.
Sing Them Home is a magnificent tapestry of lives connected and undone by tragedy, lives poised—unbeknownst to the characters themselves—for redemption.
Chapter 1
The Mayor Ignores the Rules
For someone born and bred right
here in the rainwater basin of the central great plains, Llewellyn Jones—
the mayor and presumptive leader of Emlyn Springs, Nebraska—is
showing a sad lack of common sense. His ladyfriend and bedfellow for
the past twenty-five years, Alvina Closs, is flummoxed.
“Can’t you wait an hour?” she is saying. “You can still get in nine
holes—maybe even eighteen—after it blows over.”
“I’ve got a tee time reserved,” he answers. “I’m expected.”
“We don’t live in Miami!” Alvina counters, shrilly. “It’s not as if
there’s a crowd of people waiting to play. Why can’t you wait?”
“I’m going now, Viney,” he says. Just like that. No explanation. No
compromise.
“You and your goddamned golf.”
He gives her a level, noncommittal look. “I’ll be home by happy hour,”
he ...
I am singing praises for Sing Them Home, a delightful read. It has what any good musical and literary composition should have—a unique melody with harmony, tempo, lyrical style, rhythm, lulls and crescendos building to a stunning climax. It also has characters to cheer for in spite of all their foibles. Perhaps that is why it is so easy to like them.
Who could not sympathize immediately with three young children, ages 7-14, whose mother was swept away in a Nebraska tornado never to be found. Not a trace, not even of the wheelchair that encased her body ridden with multiple sclerosis. Sing Them Home could be a depressing story, but instead I found myself smiling and laughing quite a bit as Stephanie Kallos depicts, with humor and sensitivity, life in Emlyn Springs, Nebraska, a fictional town thirty miles from Lincoln...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Vy Armour).
The Gymanfa Ganu
In Sing Them Home, the town of Emlyn
Springs celebrates an annual Gymanfa Ganu, also
known as Cymanfa Ganu (pronounced
cuh-MAN-va GA-nee), which is a Welsh festival of
sacred hymns sung with four part harmony by a
congregation, usually under the direction of a
choral director.
The tradition grew out of the temperance movement in
mid-nineteenth century Wales when choral societies were founded as one solution to the
grave problem of drinking. Because of the unsanitary
conditions in the rapidly-growing housing
developments, water was unsafe to drink and beer
(sterilized by the fermentation process) was ...
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