Falls

"I read THE FALLS...in what seemed like one held breath. Set around Niagara, the story reflects all the romance, mystery, and terror of that spectacular waterfall. It's a great confluence of tones--grotesque and domestic, tragic and comic. The currents of various styles and points of view blend together in a way that can't possibly work, but does....THE FALLS is written in a strange, fluid cycle of voices, a blending of these characters' thoughts and the author's searing, ironic judgment. Sometimes, characters speak for themselves, or the three Burnaby children speak in a kind of composite voice. Some sections employ the repetitions of a chorus. Others sound like newspaper accounts. One odd chapter reads like an eroticized ghost story. Oates handles all this with winning confidence, moving through intimate details just as deftly as she re-creates a crucial period in environmental law....Surprisingly, though it's full of creepy, ominous energy, by the end this is a novel of forgiveness, of learning to accept what's oddest and cruelest about those we love.Oates, Joyce Carol is the author of 'Falls' with ISBN 9780060722289 and ISBN 0060722282.