A lengthy read that might make you want to stop before you get halfway--- IF alternating between several decades back and forth and back and forth irritates you, iF dialogue in a foreign language without translation irritates you, IF lengthy sections about only one character make you forget the other main characters, IF what may seem like random inserts of the dead character's diary pages confuse you.
If you live in or grew up in tornado alley, you might find interesting how the "story" of the one that hit this town takes on a life of its own. I know the "tornado" theme was what made me put the book on my wish list in the first place.
But overall I liked the book, it was just a struggle to get through it with all the changes in timeframe, voice, and focus. I considered giving up many times, but was glad I finished it.
The premise of the book sounded interesting: 3 young siblings left behind after their mother disappeared during a tornado; all supposedly with stress related mental issues. The oldest, Larken Jones is an overweight art professor hiding her eating disorder from everyone. Perpetually single but in love with her married neighbor. She's just existing from day to day not really living at all. The middle child, Gaelan is an overly sensitive and good looking body-building weatherman who uses women and discards them (or they discard him). I got the feeling he might be gay and hiding it from everyone including himself. (I was surprisingly wrong about this.) And of course, the youngest, Bonnie who is an anomaly. She collects trash in an effort to find a clue to her mother's disappearance. She basically lives in a shack with all this junk as decoration. She is very civic-minded: mowing old ladies lawns, going to the school to help with the kids, attending town meetings, etc. She's rather odd but perfectly content.
The story is very disconcerting because it jumps back and forth in time. When any of the children are traveling, the story regresses (without notice) to an earlier time in their lives. Then jumps back to the place in time they actually are. The most disconcerting this is that Hope Jones (their mother) isn't part of the story at all. By the time the story starts, she has already "gone up" as they refer to her death. So you don't get a feel for her or of her personality. The only way you "know" Hope is through her diary entries and they don't show her in the best light. Unfortunately, I found Hope to be whiny and irritating as hell. I just couldn't find it in myself to like her at all and I became rather uninterested in reading (listening) to her constant diatribe.
This is not usually something I would read but I needed a book set in Nebraska and this is all I could find that I was even willing to read. Thankfully I found an audiobook otherwise I never would have gotten past the first chapter. Though in a hard copy I could have easily skipped over all the stuff that happened once Llewlyn Jones died instead of having to endure all the Welsh singing and the morbidity of the weekly death extravaganza. Where one description would suffice, the author repeatedly used three. I found the entire story to be more babble than substance making a 300 page book into a 542 page monstrosity.
