Sing Them Home: A Novel

Amazon Best Books of the Month, January 2009: Trafficking between the here and the hereafter is an enticing premise for fiction, rich with opportunities for the kind of deus ex machina-esque plot twists that--in the right hands--can reel a reader right in. Stephanie Kallos explores this peculiar nexus of living and dead in Sing Them Home, where we're introduced to the Joneses, a Nebraskan family struck twice by meteorological disaster. The three Jones children never quite recover from the first blight (their mother Hope is inexplicably lost in a violent tornado), and Kallos renders their charms and failings as if she herself were like so many of the departed folks who stand sentinel in this small Midwestern town, seeing more than any living eye does. When the second tragedy strikes and the now-grown children lose their father, it's the chorus of the dead (Hope among them) and the living together that eases their homecoming. It's a significant imaginative leap, and you can't help but admire Kallos for taking it: she knows these characters so intimately and spins their stories with such confidence that you'll follow her right to the end, no questions asked. --Anne Bartholomew