The Falls

The Falls by Joyce Carol Oates

 

Awards
Orange Prize for Fiction (nominee)

A novel of tremendous sweep and pace about the American family in crisis - but also about America itself in the mid-20th century. This novel is the crowning achievement of Joyce Carol Oates's career to date. A man climbs over the railings and plunges into Niagara Falls. He's a newly-wed, and his bride has been left behind in the honeymoon suite the morning after their wedding. For two weeks, Ariah, the deserted bride, waits by the side of the roaring waterfall for news of her husband's recovered body. During her vigil, an unlikely new love story begins to unfold when she meets a wealthy lawyer who is transfixed by her strange, otherworldly gaze. So it all begins, in the 1950s, with the dark foreboding of the Falls the sinister background to events. From this cataclysmic event unfurls a drama of parents and their children; of secrets and sins; of lawsuits, murder and, eventually redemption. As Alma's children learn that their past is enmeshed with a hushed-up scandal involving radioactive waste materials, they are confronting not only their own family history, but America's own murky past.
-FantasticFiction

 

This incredibly well written book makes me look forward to reading more of Joyce Carol Oates' work.  I rate this one with five stars*****

-MONA