Too Close to the Falls
March 5th, 2006
Too Close to the Falls — By Catherine Gildiner
Young Catherine has an unusual, adventurous childhood, growing up in the small town of Lewiston, New York, near Niagara Falls. At the suggestion of the family doctor, Catherine’s parents put their active daughter to work in her father’s pharmacy, where she travels around the area from the age of four, assisting the kind and patient Roy with deliveries. They have many adventures on the road together, making deliveries to the nearby Indian reservation and to Marilyn Monroe on location filming “Niagara.”
Gildiner’s mother is an unusual woman. She dresses the part of a conservative fifties housewife is outwardly conforms to the ideals of the time, but her real interests are scholarly rather than domestic. She’s a loving but rather detached mother, and she completely opts out of grocery shopping, cooking, or serving food of any kind.
Gildiner shares her childhood with warmth and humor, and perfectly captures her youthful perspective on the world around her. I enjoyed most of the book, until the last chapter, which was dark and disturbing. I found this an unpleasant ending to the book, and wish there were one more chapter– this just didn’t feel like the right place for the book to end.
