Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos

I really enjoyed her first book (Broken For You) and this one is every bit as good. Kallos has a talent for creating unusual characters dealing with unique circumstances. In this book, she introduces the reader to the adult children of a woman who "went up" in a tornado and never came down - Larken, a college art professor who gorges herself on junk food; Galen, a TV weatherman who is obsessed with body-building and Arnold Schwarznegger; and Bonnie, the child who survived the tornado and spends her life looking for remnants of their mother. The story also tells about life and the people in a small Nebraska town, their customs and relationships. The reader also becomes acquainted with Hope, their mother, through her diary, an interesting look into the past. "With breathtaking lyricism, wisdom, and humor, Stephanie Kallos offers up a magnificent tapestry of lives connected and undone by loss, lives poised--unbeknownst to the characters themselves--for redepmtion." This is one of those books that is hard to put down once you start reading!