Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos was an unknown entity when I picked the audio version at the library a few weeks ago. The large yellow sticker on the front of the audio CD case labeled it at 2011‘s All Iowa Read.
The plot summary on the back cover introduced Hope Jones, a woman swallowed by a tornado in the mid-1970s and alluded to her disappearance and it’s impact on the lives of her three children, even into adulthood. The Iowa/tornado connection was obvious, but when I took the book home and began listening, others emerged.
Hope and her family live in Emlyn Springs, a small, fictitious town with Welsh roots south of Lincoln, Nebraska. The town is a vibrant community when Hope and her physician husband, Llewellyn move there in the early 1960s. Over the years, Emlyn Springs follows the same slow decline of many small, Iowa towns, exacerbated by the farm crisis in the 1980s. By the early 2000s, Emlyn Springs, home of Fancy Egg Days, is struggling to survive.
The book had another, more personal connection. Hope Jones, mother of three, is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) when her children are young. At the heart of the book is the devastation wrought on Hope’s body and self-image, her marriage, and her children by the nasty, debilitating disease. It’s effects were a whirlwind of destruction, every bit as treacherous and confusing as the tornadoes that strike Emlyn Springs in 1978 and 2004.
How could I not compare and contrast the Jones family’s experience to our own?
Dad was diagnosed in 1958. Hope some years later.
Mom’s total, almost obsessive devotion to Dad. Llewellyn Jones pulling away from him.
The impact of the illness on Hope’s three children into adulthood. My siblings and I, also.
Emlyn Springs residents caring more than Hope realized. The same was true in our town.
The ways MS changed Hope’s personality. The ways it changed my father, too.
To be honest, I didn’t like Hope much by the end of the book. I didn’t like her response to the disease, even though I understood her reasons. Her multiplied devastation in her family. She was like someone who chooses to stand on the roof during a tornado instead of going to the basement. Sing Them Home bothered me. A lot. I found it too dark, too lacking in hope – ironic in light of the main character’s name. But I’m glad to have read it and wholeheartedly recommend it.
Why? Because it gives an accurate picture of small town, midwestern life. And once you’re read it, you will look at multiple sclerosis with new eyes. So I say, join all Iowa and read this book. Hopefully, it will bother you, too.
