Sing Me Home
Grade : C+

Sing Me Home is Jerri Corgiat's first book. It has its good points, most notably a very likable lead couple, and its bad points, especially the hero's way too eeevil first wife, and an ending that felt rushed. But the good outweighs the bad, and for a debut it's got promise.

Jonathan Van Castle fronts Van Castle, the hottest country rock band around. He's rebuilding his reputation after a bitter divorce from his childhood sweetheart Belinda, who accused him of drunken orgies and more. When Jon's bus pulls thorough the small town of Cordelia in the Missouri Ozarks, he impulsively decides to get out and stretch his legs. Of course he is recognized, and when he runs into a children's book store to escape his fans, the clerk doesn't seem to know who he is. Jon buys some books for his daughter and leaves, but he is impressed with the clerk, Lil O'Malley Ryan, and her china blue eyes.

Jon's relations with Belinda took a turn for the worse when he discovered her drug abuse and physical abuse of their two children. He used his economic clout over her to force her into rehab and took the children from her. The nanny he hired turned out to be unable to cope with them. A tour date sends Jon back to Cordelia where he runs into Lil and the O'Malleys, who face a family crisis. Jon offers to help them out, if Lil will marry him and take care of the children. She eventually agrees, provided the marriage is in name only, but time and attraction have a way of changing things.

Jon has the requisite tortured background for a contemporary hero. His mother killed herself when he was young, and his drunken father beat and berated him, telling him he would never amount to anything. The only source of encouragement Jon knew was Belinda and her kind mother, Dodo. Jon married Belinda and, determined to prove his father wrong, he threw his entire life into making it as a country star. His constant touring and workaholism took its toll and his marriage broke up in a blaze of scandal. Jon settled into constant touring, figuring that money would keep Belinda happy and his children secure. He knows that his children need him, but so do all the people whose jobs depend on Van Castle's continuing success, and he sub-consciously wants to prove something to his dead father.

Lil is from a large and loving family. She married her childhood sweetheart, Robbie; his death in an accident devastated her, and she has been marking time for several years. She is unimpressed with Jon's celebrity, and resists him for some time. She agrees to marry him only because she can see how much his two children need her. She is kind and motherly with them, and they swiftly grow to love her dearly. Her relationship with Jon grows more slowly and, just as it blooms into a deep love, Belinda's machinations and Jon's clinging to the past nearly destroy it.

There are two conflicts in Sing Me Home, the internal one between Jon and Lil and the external one involving Jon, Belinda, and the children. Jon and Lil's conflict is similar to the one he had with Belinda: his immersion in his work. There were times when both Lil and Jon seemed unreasonable. Lil seemed to want Jon to quit, something he simply could not do; as for Jon, he kept doing stupid, thoughtless things like forgetting his children's birthdays. He also acts like a total jerk toward the end of the book. But Jon and Lil do love each other, and the whole problem with Jon's immersion in his music gets solved via a simple solution I could have proposed pages earlier. Fans of grovelling will relish the short but intense one that ends this book.

Belinda is so rotten, she's a caricature. She is bad-tempered and promiscuous. She smokes, drinks, and uses drugs. She is cruel to her children and her mother, and her reason for hating Jon is almost laughable. Belinda shows up to move the plot away from Jon and Lil's angsting about their relationship and into external conflict territory. If Belinda had been a more complex character and less purely evil, I think she would have been more interesting.

Despite the problems I had with the book, I did enjoy much of it. I liked the setting, the lead characters, and Lil's large and tumultuous family. Fans of small town romances and musicians as characters will love this book, and I plan to give Jerri Corrigault's next book a try.

Reviewed by Ellen Micheletti
Grade : C+

Sensuality: Warm

Review Date : March 8, 2004

Publication Date: 2004

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Ellen Micheletti

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