Sing Them Home
by Stephanie Kallos
The absence of the mother: mourning and
comfort
Publisher:
Atlantic Monthly Press (January 2009)
As Larken
returns home to her small Nebraska hometown for her father Llwellyn
Jones's funeral, his death provides the catalyst for Larken and her
siblings to face the earlier loss of their mother Hope whose body just
disappeared in the midst of a tornado. Without a body to mourn or any
real answers about their mother's death, all three siblings' struggle
in silent ways as her absence touches their lives. Larken, an art
history teacher specializing in depictions of the Virgin, fills the
empty spaces with food as she struggles for promotion and to fit in
with the university's social structure. Gaelen, a meteorologist at the
local television station, finds himself in one meaningless relationship
after another. Even the inside of his house becomes a portrait of his
internal life. Given the job at a time before all the technological
sophistication of weather forecasting, Gaelen struggles to catch up
with the changes in his the industry environment. Bonnie, the youngest
sister and most dysfunctional of the three, hunts down the remnants of
other's lives in litter strewn across the landscape, looking for signs
of her mother and wishing for a child herself, a child she has little
chance of ever having. As the siblings and their stepmother (by custom
rather than a legal marriage) Viney come together, family bonds and
conflicts open the door for transformation as a dramatic incident pulls
them together.
In SING THEM HOME, Stephanie
Kallos assembles an odd cast of characters, some not even particularly
likable,sympathetic, or at least not the kind of classic expected main
characters, at least not at first glance, and yet, in bringing these
sometimes quirky characters together to tell their stories, Stephanie
Kallos creates an entire universe within a small town. Even the ghosts
of former residents join together to give the reader a sense of
community that expands beyond time and the immediate lives of Larken,
Gaelen and Bonnie. The narrative unfolds in a non-linear chronology as
the past and present are joined side by side alongside Hope's journal
entries. Not only do Hope's journals provide another perspective on the
family but as the entries become closer and closer to the date of the
tornado's destruction, questions abound, making her disappearance more
mysterious until the final dramatic and poetic twist when past and
present converge.
Poetic and yet expansive in narrative style and vision, SING THEM HOME looks deep into the
human heart while also creating a vision of a community in which
interactions and rituals bring people together. Themes of death, grief
and absence join to create a story of possibilities and presence.
Although SING THEM HOME takes
death as its focal point, from this, Stephanie Kallos creates a sense
of the raw vibrancy of life at its core. SING THEM HOME with its lyrical
prose paints a spiritual portrait of a family, indeed an eccentric
family at times, and a whole town.
After reading BROKEN FOR YOU
by Stephanie Kallos, I wondered if anything could ever match that book
which I consider one of my all-time favorites. I was even a bit
apprehensive about tackling a book with grief at its center at this
time of my life. This novel exceeded my hopes and then some. Rather
than dragging this reader into grief, SING
THEM HOME is a novel that soothes the spirit, creating a hope
and a gentle expanding vision of wholeness. The delightful uniqueness
of her characters and their town alongside the unexpected but
intriguing plot twists and imagery made me look forward to being able
to return to the world she created night after night of reading. SING THEM HOME is a deeply moving
story of transformation. From dramatic and unsettling moments, a gentle
all-encompassing sense of comfort emerges.
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