Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos

This is the All-Iowa book selection for 2011. I downloaded it from WILBOR onto my Ipod - and then I devoted 40 hours of my life to listening to this book! It did not grab my interest right away, but soon I was involved in the story of the Jones family. Three decades ago a tornado devastated their small Nebraska town. The mother and wife, Hope, is "taken up" by the storm - and her body is never found. Her husband, Llewellyn, and three children, Larken, Gaelen and Bonnie, are as devastated as their house. This is the story of then and now. We get to know Hope before she was a mother and then as she had her children. We get to know the children before they lost their mother and afterward. They have grown up to be ......well a bit strange. One is a professor, one is a weatherman (not a meteorologist!) and one spends a lot of time looking for scraps of things that the weather has blown away, hoping to find something of her mother's. Yeah, pretty weird. The way the story goes back and forth between time periods and between people made it an intriguing book.

The Confession by John Grisham

Another great, great book by Grisham. I have to wonder how the tourist board in Texas feels about it! This is not a very flattering book about the state. In 1998 a high school cheerleader is abducted, raped and killed - but her body is never found. That is because the guilty guy, Travis Boyette, buried her body far from the scene of the abduction. Happily for the state of Texas they were able to go ahead and force a "confession" from a young black man, Donte Drumm. Donte is now days away from execution. Travis is now dying from a brain tumor and decides that confession might be good for the soul. So he confesses to a minister in Kansas.
This was a great book!!!!! Lots of action, suspense and wonderful characters - some you love and some you hate. This is definitely towards the top of my favorite Grisham books.

Simply from Scratch by Alicia Bessette

This was a wonderful book. The characters were engaging and likable. Zell has been a young widow for a year. She has been unable to get through her grief and is keeping family and friends at a distance. She does however, make two new friends - her neighbors, nine-year-old Ingrid and her father Garrett. They meet when the firemen are putting out the fire in Zell's oven. She is not much of a cook and since Nick's death she had not turned on the oven. Unfortunately when she pre-heated the oven she was unaware that Nick had hidden a present for her inside. The package is not totally destroyed but Bessette makes us wait until the end of the book to find out what was in it! The story is about the developing relationship between Zell and Ingrid as they try to bake a winning recipe for a contest. It is nice to read about people and families who are not dysfunctional - just prone to making a few bad decisions like the rest of us!