While her navy husband is serving a year in Africa, Sarah Smiley and her 3 children invite guests to fill his place at the table each week. This is as much a story of a single mother coping with a busy life with 3 children as it is about those dinners and those guests. An unexpectedly good read. ( )

Just about every expert out there talks about the importance of family dinners. But what do you do when your family is apart, not by choice, but because the husband and father is military and deployed for a year? If you are Sarah Smiley and her three boys, you invite guests to fill the empty seat at the table.

When the Smiley family found out that Dustin would be deployed to Afghanistan for a year, they knew that it would not be easy. The three boys were old enough to miss their father and Sarah Smiley was faced with trying to hold her house together while finishing up her degree without her biggest supporter to help her. In order to help the boys adjust to life without their dad for the year, they came up with the idea to share their Sunday dinners with others for the next 52 weeks. Smiley wanted the boys to have local role models, to show them about community, and to be just a little bit distracted from Dustin's absence. The guests they invited ranged the gamut from politicians to local celebrities, from beloved teachers to special neighbors. Most of the dinners took place at the Smiley's home but a few of them involved being at someone else's home or doing things that pushed their boundaries.

The book is not just about the dinners though. It is also about parenting alone while a spouse is on deployment. It's about the way in which the boys reacted to their father's absence. And neither of these latter two things were easy. Smiley details the crying and the despair that overwhelmed her at times. She writes about the boys' frequent misbehavior. In other words, she shows her family warts and all.

Dinner With the Smileys is certainly homey, heartwarming, and honest. But it suffers a bit from the mélange of agendas: the dinners and guests themselves, the life and sacrifices of a military family, or the lessons she and the boys learned from their guests. The beginning of the book spends a lot of time on the guests and the experiences of the Smiley family as they embark on this project but by the end, the guests and the dinners are glossed over too speedily, sometimes dealt with in the span of a single sentence. This imbalance between beginning and end made the experiment feel a bit forced by the time the reader reaches the last page. This was indeed a wonderful premise and a feel-good read but in the end, while I enjoyed reading it, it seemed just a little cursory and ultimately a little less insightful than I would have expected. ( )

I especially liked the audio because Sarah reads it and I love the way she reads her children's voices. Many messages in this book I really enjoyed it. ( )

When their Dad is scheduled for a one year (or longer) deployment to Africa and one of the three Smiley boys comments that he will be most missed at the family dinnertime, the Smileys decide to try inviting someone over for dinner once a week to help fill the empty space and distract them from their sadness. The next year's worth of dinner guests run the gamut from the boys' teachers to political figures to R2D2 (yeah, how cool is that?!). Their story is lovely, funny, heart warming (yes, I found myself shedding tears often), and amazing. I still am in awe that Sarah Smiley was able to, on her own (but with some help from friends and family), take care of her three precocious boys, teach at the university, work on (and receive) her Masters degree, write her weekly blog and newspaper column, invite people to dinner, make and serve them dinner, and write this book. She does a wonderful job of sharing her joys and sorrows, her uncertainty and her triumphs, and lets us take a peek into the life of a military family coping with the long term absence of a husband and a father. ( )

I only read a few non-fiction books a year but this one stood out when I saw it online. I really enjoyed it and it was pleasant to read about a very normal family having to deal with the husband and dad being deployed for a year. The writing was very well done and it didn't glaze over the times the kids couldn't cooperate with mom and the Dinners with the Smileys… I loved learning who came to the dinners and how they came about. Made me think about coping alone with children for an extended period of time as our soldiers families do every day. A heartwarming read. ( )