From Publishers Weekly
Wharton is an award-winning novelist (Birdie; Dad; A Midnight Clear) who six years ago lost his daughter, her husband and their two babies in a multi-car highway crash in Oregon caused by smoke from nearby "field burning" that blinded the drivers. In this account, based on his knowledge of the accident and his involvement in the years of legal shenanigans that followed, Wharton writes what is in effect a documentary novel, bringing it all to harrowing life with the skills of a born storyteller. In the first chapters, he writes as daughter Kate, evoking her wandering life, her unhappy first marriage, her meeting in Germany with big, cheerful Bert from Oregon, their homecoming to his native state and the moments right up to the crash. As Will, her father, he recounts his family's vast sorrow?and there are few more wrenching accounts of grief in literature?and his determination, buoyed by a dream of the dead family, to seek redress for their deaths. Hiring an Oregon law firm, he soon runs into a wall of resistance: the field burning is seen as an economic right of the state's grass growers, despite strong local opposition, and soon the lawsuits begin to fly back and forth. Frustrated in his efforts to win a jury trial, surrounded by lawyers and friends who see cash as fair payment for life, Wharton retreats to an elegiac but wonderfully poetic conclusion. His book has the ring of emotional truth even as it reads like a grippingly dramatic novel, and its blend of sorrow and a healing anger has a bracingly cathartic effect. 50,000 first printing; author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Library Journal
Until August 3, 1988, novelist Wharton (Birdy, 1979, Last Lovers, LJ 4/15/91) and his close-knit family had led a rather charmed and charming life "in a kind of never-never land where nothing happens to us, only to other people." But on that terrible day, disaster struck; Wharton's oldest daughter, Kate; her husband, Bert; and their daughters, two-year-old Dayiel and eight-month-old Mia, were killed in a 23-car collision on an Oregon highway, triggered by dense smoke rolling over from nearby fields where a farmer had been burning grass stubble. In his first nonfiction work, which he terms "biography-autobiography-fiction...in the form of a documentary novel." Wharton applies the same literary techniques that made his novels so emotionally compelling to tell a powerful story of devastating loss and spiritual healing. In Part 1, he uses Kate's voice poignantly to reimagine the vibrant lives and violent deaths of a loving young family. In the next two sections, Wharton recounts his grief and anger at an accident that could have been prevented and his three-year legal battle to bring the environmental issue of field burning to trial. No happy endings here, but two spiritual epiphanies give Wharton and readers a new understanding of life and whatever lies beyond death. Highly recommended. [See profile on p. 109.?Ed.]?Wilda Williams, "Library Journal.
-?Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
