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This novel is a portrait of three siblings who have lived in the shadow of unresolved grief since their mother's disappearance when they were children. Everyone in Emlyn Springs knows the story of Hope Jones, the physician's wife whose big dreams for their tiny town were lost along with her in the tornado of 1978. For Hope's three young children, the stability of life with their preoccupied father, and with Viney, their mother's spitfire best friend, is no match for Hope's absence. Larken, the eldest, is now an art history professor who seeks in food an answer to a less tangible hunger; Gaelan, the son, is a telegenic weatherman who devotes his life to predicting the unpredictable; and the youngest, Bonnie, is a self-proclaimed archivist who combs roadsides for clues to her mother's legacy, and permission to move on. When they're summoned home after their father's death, each sibling is forced to revisit the childhood tragedy that has defined their lives.… (mehr)
BookshelfMonstrosity: Family interactions between fathers, mothers, and siblings -- living and dead, present and past -- are the focus of these sharply observed tales. Character-driven and lyrical, they share a thoughtful, bittersweet tone and a complex style perfect for their mature themes.… (mehr)
Hope Jones, married to a physician, battling a chronic disease, and living in rural Nebraska with three children, is one day tragically swept away by a tornado and never seen again. Many years later, when their father also dies somewhat tragically by a weather event, her grown children are still struggling to make sense of their lives.
This is a long novel that seemed to have a lot of potential. It's not every day you come across a book about someone being swept away by a tornado. The fact that Hope's disappearance/death was referred to numerous times in the story not by either of these terms, but instead as 'When Hope "went up"' seemed especially endearing. The story is told from varied points of view, not only from each of her children, but from Hope herself in the form of diary entries, a few times by a few extraneous characters, and even from the souls (?) of those in the community who had previously died. And the timelines switch back and forth between Hope's earlier married years, the years when her health began to decline, and the present day of her children. All three of Hope's children seem to be struggling in some way or another, but I didn't really feel as though this had anything to do directly with the fact that they'd lost their mother at a younger age. There were times when the story became bogged down with excessive detail, as though the author were trying too hard with descriptive content. Though there were some quirky character traits with some of the characters, I never really felt a true connection with any of Hope's children. The town of Emlyn Springs was almost a character in itself, and I think maybe I most enjoyed that aspect of the story. I don't think this was a bad book, but I often wondered where the story was going and exactly what the author wanted the reader to come away with. It seemed like it had the potential to be more than it was. ( )
The last 100 pages were okay, the rest was annoying, boring, repetitious, and waaaaay to long. The attempts to add magic to the story were leaden, the characters were whiny and unlikeable and worst of all, they were stereotypically damaged. This would have made an excellent short story! ( )
The Jones family lives in Emlyn Springs, Nebraska. There are tornadoes there once in awhile.This is a story about families and small towns, love and trusting that love. Good story-telling, a good read. ( )
I loved this book & definitely recommend it. It’s a distinctly North American kind of magic realism, with more spacious rhythms and an underlying allegiance to spiritualism. It’s centered in a small Nebraska town with a strong Welsh identity. Everyone sings, and old traditions around death and singing have prevailed. The town itself is a character – personable, stubborn, exasperating, eccentric, lovable. The weather is itself a very strong character! All the human characters – both living and dead - are beautifully drawn and all their stories worth telling. ( )
You have to get through the first section that describes the Dead Fathers and Dead Mothers and sounds eerie and strange. Then you get pulled in to the events surrounding three siblings, their mother, their father's common-law wife, and their small town. The characters appear flat, at first, but they wonderfully break through their stereotypes to reveal a lot of depth. The narrative takes on flashblacks through the mother's diary entries, but mostly follows the lives of the siblings as they live out the year following their father's death.
I enjoyed the book immensely. Nothing too heavy, but not trivial, either. ( )
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People who say cemeteries are peaceful probably have no means of reception for the powerful static of rushing voices that throb there. I don't believe all cemetery visits can be fruitful because there is no reason why, once having discarded the body, the soul should haunt its remains. My belief is that simply as a matter of tact and convenience some souls make an effort from time to time to be present at a common meeting place. -from Terra Infirma: A Memoir of My Mother's Life in Mine by Rodger Kamenetz
Widmung
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For my parents, Gregory William Kallos August 1, 1927-January 8, 2005 and Doris “Dorie” Arlene Dorn Kallos October 16, 1931-January 6, 2006
and my friend, Michael Thomas Maschinot November 8, 1957-June 22, 2007
Erste Worte
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It's so hard to explain what the dead really want.
Zitate
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Take the Jones children, for example. For most of their lives, they have been waiting for their mother to come down. To do otherwise, they believe, would be a betrayal.
Llewellyn Jones, the oldest Jones boy, that smart handsome homegrown young man who everyone said could have been an opera singer if he'd wanted, could have had a music scholarship … but who wanted to be a doctor instead, a doctor, and became one! Not only that, he came back!
When Larken imagines looking at Nebraska from above, she sees Tornado Alley as an actual boundaried region that is always hovering, ever-present, invisible to Doppler radar
Season tickets to University of Nebraska football games are to Nebraskans what rent-controlled apartments are to Manhattanites.
A human being can only hold so much, and grief occupies a large piece of real estate. When it arrives, grief abides by the laws of manifest destiny. Uninvited but entitled, it takes up residence in every seen and unseen part of a person. Reading comprehension is only one of the many countries that grief defeats, oppresses, and occupies.
Sexual attraction isn't a separate entity for women, something they wall off form the rest of their lives; it arises from and connects to everything. Women carry different things in their heads, Gaelan suspects, when they come to bed. For men – and he's no different, he'd be the first to admit it – sex is a simple here-and-now experience. But a woman in bed might be remembering how you quibbled about buying artichoke hearts, forgot to hold the door open, or didn't take the shortcut. You have to prove yourself to women in these little ways all the time. They remember everything that happens outside the bedroom and bring it in, even though they don't always know that they're doing it. It's really best to just lay low and do as they ask.
Motherhood is messy in so many more ways than I expected. A chaos of emotions and laundry. A life without boundaries, splitting at the seams and spilling over everywhere.
And Llewellyn didn't know – the way parents often don't – that it's often the semiconscious comment, the teasing remark, the snippy chastisement uttered in frustration at the end of a trying day that will be one your child remembers and clings to and incorporates into the mold out of which they'll re-form themselves. Not the countless times he's said Good job, son, or I'm so proud of you, but the single time he barked …
It is difficult, so difficult for the aggrieved to open themselves to the complexity of feeling that follows a loss – and many cannot. There is a commonly held misconception that we must only speak well of the dead, encountering them in our hearts and minds with abiding love and unperturbed kindness, fabricating a revisionist view of personal history that excludes pain, suffering, and sin.
I think what I cannot bear above all else is the demise of myself in full view of my children. They will only remember what they see last. The thought that their enduring image of me will be as a withered, incapacitated, speechless, muddled mass of exposed nerve endings is too horrific. I want to take a snapshot of myself for them before that point. I want to freeze their view, short-stop the long decline.
No one really knows a small town like the people who live there. No one else understands why they stay, maybe not even those who do.
Letzte Worte
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These improbabilities set something twanging in the pools of their bellies, and as the birds at lucky dusk cry, Really? Really? Tell me tell me tell me tell me tell me, they all let forth with laughter.
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▾Buchbeschreibungen
This novel is a portrait of three siblings who have lived in the shadow of unresolved grief since their mother's disappearance when they were children. Everyone in Emlyn Springs knows the story of Hope Jones, the physician's wife whose big dreams for their tiny town were lost along with her in the tornado of 1978. For Hope's three young children, the stability of life with their preoccupied father, and with Viney, their mother's spitfire best friend, is no match for Hope's absence. Larken, the eldest, is now an art history professor who seeks in food an answer to a less tangible hunger; Gaelan, the son, is a telegenic weatherman who devotes his life to predicting the unpredictable; and the youngest, Bonnie, is a self-proclaimed archivist who combs roadsides for clues to her mother's legacy, and permission to move on. When they're summoned home after their father's death, each sibling is forced to revisit the childhood tragedy that has defined their lives.
This is a long novel that seemed to have a lot of potential. It's not every day you come across a book about someone being swept away by a tornado. The fact that Hope's disappearance/death was referred to numerous times in the story not by either of these terms, but instead as 'When Hope "went up"' seemed especially endearing. The story is told from varied points of view, not only from each of her children, but from Hope herself in the form of diary entries, a few times by a few extraneous characters, and even from the souls (?) of those in the community who had previously died. And the timelines switch back and forth between Hope's earlier married years, the years when her health began to decline, and the present day of her children. All three of Hope's children seem to be struggling in some way or another, but I didn't really feel as though this had anything to do directly with the fact that they'd lost their mother at a younger age. There were times when the story became bogged down with excessive detail, as though the author were trying too hard with descriptive content. Though there were some quirky character traits with some of the characters, I never really felt a true connection with any of Hope's children. The town of Emlyn Springs was almost a character in itself, and I think maybe I most enjoyed that aspect of the story. I don't think this was a bad book, but I often wondered where the story was going and exactly what the author wanted the reader to come away with. It seemed like it had the potential to be more than it was. ( )