Interesting that a woman with a Greek name should invest the time and energy in creating a small Welsh town in the flats of Nebraska. Or maybe Nebraska isn't as flat as I thought, I did drive across it once in early winter - December of 1969, to be precise. I remember it as being utterly flat (and white at the time) as far as I could see in any direction. The highway was dead straight, the sky was the same color or uncolor as everything else, and the only interruption in all of the flat whiteness was the occasional overpass where the local road crossed over the interstate. I found it quite terrifying.
Oh yes, the book. I bought it on impulse - never let it be said that those endless emails from Amazon are not effective. I probably would never have seen it in a real book store because I don't usually cruise the shelves where this sort of thing lives. Although, I probably would have picked it up for the title if I had happened to see it.
It is a little bit mystical, a little bit family saga, a little (very little) bit mystery and I like very much that Kallos felt no need to rationalize everything. If you are going to be mystical, be mystical and don't apologize for it. The family consists of three adult children whose mother "went up" and never came back down in a tornado, their father, and their father's long-time mistress. We discover the mother bit by bit through the story, mainly through excerpts from her journal which also disappeared at the time of the tornado. The three children are all disfunctional and fundamentally solitary - without apparent means for correcting their deficits, and end up in situations which have the potential to "cure" them. It also kept me reading way too late on a Tuesday night, but I haven't decided whether or not to recommend it. I suppose I could say "if you like this sort of thing" but I can't quite decide what sort of thing it is.
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