Sing Them Home

Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos

Three children's lives are dramatically altered after the disappearance of their mother, Hope Jones, following the tornado of 1978. Bonnie, the youngest of the three, was also caught up in the tornade but managed to land square on the roots of an upturned tree...sitting on her bicycle. Now the Jones children have grown up and are leading very different lives from one another; but when disaster strikes again the three of them will feel separate pulls drawing them back to the community of Emlyn Springs, where they once called home.

I found this novel readlly hard to get into, and once I was fairly far in the story, I regret to admit that I found it easy to put down. That's not to say that it didn't give me something to think about in the "off-time" (when I'm not reading), but it wasn't a book that I hurried back to pick up and finish. I think some of that can be attributed to the fact that I found a lot of the story redundant. Another reason is that it seemed as though the author began to explore certain ideas (ie: the dead mothers and dead fathers of Emlyn Springs mentioned in the opening of the novel) but failed to go all the way and stay consistent with that leaving the reader to wonder why it was bothered to be mentioned at all. I won't call this novel "bad", as it was an interesting plot and the characters seemed real enough, but on the flip side, I also won't call this novel "great". It was good. That's it. To put it in a different way: I had borrowed this novel to read, and wouldn't bother asking to borrow it again for a re-read. That being said, I'd like to give this author another chance by checking out another of her works - I just hope the editor of her other novels was a bit more careful, as I was able to find several grammer and spelling errors in this book (but who's perfect?). So although I wouldn't recommend this novel, I do recommend that you use your own judgement and read it if it strikes you as interesting!