Cathy Marie Buchanan’s The Day the Falls Stood Still

I’m always cautious of historical novels that have any form of the word “romance” anywhere in their descriptions, because things can turn real slutty real fast. I picked it up this summer because, like I mentioned about John Banville’s The Sea, I’m in what seems like a never-ending quest to read the books that are sitting unread on my bookshelf. Who could resist a World War I era story set at Niagara Falls? If nothing else, the book seemed like it would be a light, summer read.

Instead of a light summer read, though, I found a story with an overwhelming theme of loss. Our heroine, Bess, is seventeen when her father loses his well-paying job at a power company that generates power from the flow of the river racing over the falls. This sets in motion a series of unfortunate events and, as such, Bess needs to makes the standard choices regarding love and independence and deals with—you guessed it—loss. I’ve already covered the loss of employment and the loss of money, but there is loss of family members and dealing with death, loss of innocence as a generation of young men goes off to war, loss of friendship, loss of faith, and, the most unique element of the story, loss of the natural river flow as industrial companies siphon off water for their operations. This is where the romance comes in: as it happens, Bess marries the strong, hunky Riverman, who is the stuff of legends and whose grandfather was the original stuff of legends, because of their ability to read the river, sense shifts in the wind that causes ice bridges to melt, and knows just how to fish the dead bodies (loss again!) drowned in the falls and swirling around the whirlpools and eddies. See what I mean about being a little heavy for a summer read? In any case, Bess had just enough moxy to keep me picking up the book, and the story certainly got me thinking of my own family visits to Niagara Falls, and I can certainly say I’m glad the Falls still inspire a sense of wonder in us.

Buchanan, Cathy Marie. The Day the Falls Stood Still. New York: Voice / Hyperion, 2009.