Stephanie Kallos

Do you remember watching the movie The Sixth Sense? And when, at the end, you realized that the boy, Cole, had been seeing dead people all along, it changed your experience of the entire movie? (At least that's how it was for me.) I didn't see the twist coming at all, and I loved it.

In Language Arts, we meet Cody and his family. Cody was a happy little boy. He was developing normally until he started to lose language. His parents, Charles and Alison, took him to specialist after specialist show more to find out what happened and to try to help him get better.

Cody doesn't get better. Shortly after the birth of Cody's sister, Emmy, Charles and Alison's marriage deteriorates. As Cody gets older, and ages out of the system that can provide care for him, Charles and Alison have to work together to find a suitable living situation for him.

We see everything as Charles and Emmy experience this. Kallos weaves together this family's struggle, including back story around Charles, with Charles as a child befriending an autistic classmate, language arts, and, interestingly, Palmer handwriting. Language Arts felt a little melancholy, heavy with this family's desperation to try to help Cody as well as deal with deteriorating relationships.

I was engaged in the story as it was, and then a Sixth Sense kind of twist came at the end that made me go back and reread passages of the book to see how she did it. SO well done! show less

I started this book, really couldn't get into it, so put it aside. In the meantime, a friend read it and loved it. At her urging, I picked it up again -- this time, I really liked it.

The title is perfect, in so many senses, some that become clearer as the book progresses. What starts out to be two isolated, clearly broken "Eleanor Rigby" women gel into a family, along with the rag-tag recruits who affix themselves into their lives. But that's the cheater's description. The book is so much show more more, in such unexpected ways.

There is a point, where a character is cooking and the following passage occurs, where he is describing how his grandmother taught him to cook:

"'Slow down, boychick' she was always saying. 'Cooking is not to rush. It's a prayer. A gift of love. It's a family. It's standing in the company of your ancestors and feeling their hands, helping you.'" Bruce started weaving the strands into braids. "When you're Jewish, everything that matters happens in the kitchen."

Despite the fact that I was en route to my nephew's Bar Mitzvah, I didn't expect to be poleaxed by a fundamental truth of my Jewish heritage. Nor did I expect to stumble into the creation of art that matches very much some of my artistic tendencies, or a philosophy of giving I've always wished to be able to carry out. I didn't expect to see one of the characters break in so many ways, and resurrect into something that could take "broken" and make it beautiful. I just didn't expect...

I passed this book on to my cousin, simply because of the above quote. Glad I picked this up again and finished it this time. show less

The thing about Stephanie Kallos' writing is that you start a story and you think, "Get to the point." She gives you a lot of background and a lot of detail and just when you think you might have had enough...you find yourself totally wrapped up in her narrative. I cared about the characters in the novel so much by the end that I wanted to keep following their lives. Difficult situations, not always dealt with gracefully, that that's life with real people. Ambivalence and ambiguity are the show more hardest things to master in life, and Kallos gives you that struggle in deft prose. I'm a real fan. But each time I start one of her books, I read for a while and think, "Get to the point" and whoosh! I'm totally involved. show less

I enjoyed this book, largely because the setting is Nebraska, a state I called home for many years.
If you've ever driven through Nebraska (it seems that people who say they've been to Nebraska usually mean that they've driven through it - in one side and out the other, driving the interstate on the way to somewhere else), you may remember the middle part, where land is flat and roads are laid out on a mile grid and dotted with farms. That was my home. For fun, we drove to the area where show more this book is set – as the author says, “southeastern Nebraska is hillier than many people realize” - for weekends of camping with beautiful scenery. Stephanie Kallos described it perfectly.

Nebraska holds pockets of ethnic groups in scattered communities; Czech, German and Swedish towns all were near our neck of the woods. I enjoyed the author's descriptions of Welsh culture, and their singing traditions.

She also got it right describing the University of Nebraska; I have a son who will soon graduate from there, so I've been on campus numerous times. Even her description about “ the granddaddy of all university programs, the one that inhabits the symbolic epicenter of severe storm reporting: the University of Oklahoma” brought smiles of remembrance of our visit to the meteorology center at OU during the time before another son graduated from the University of Oklahoma.

Just listen to me rambling on and on … unemployed for a very long stretch and now uprooted, I guess my heart-strings set to twangin' with this read. Moving on … with apologies ...

So the setting was evocatively descriptive. The characters, too - very real in their personal dimensions and their relationships, especially the grown siblings. I enjoyed the device of the mother's diary, filling in the back-story but lost to the tornado and never read by her family.

I'm not a believer in ghosts, but still smiled my way through the author's 'dead mothers' and 'dead fathers' and their thoughts about the goings-on happening around them.

Sing Them Home is a very emotional book. The pain of watching your own body degenerate with M.S., while wanting your children to remember you whole. Love lost, while substitutes try to fill the hole – food, working out, collecting, searching. Small town life – mediocrity and solace.

And all of it so very well written. show less