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.