She describes the Niagara river as “calm, rarely making waves, it has deadly whirlpools swirling on its surface which can suck anything into their vortices in seconds.”
I worked and went to restaurants and delivered everything from band-aids to morphine in the Niagara Frontier.” Gildiner’s memoir uses the roiling waters of the Niagara as a metaphor for this unsettling childhood. For over ten years I never once had a meal at home, and that included Christmas. Gildiner says, “I was exposed to situations I later realized were unusual for a child. Gildiner spends her days in the passenger seat reading out addresses to Roy, her “soul mate in experience” who “made chestnuts into jewels, bottle tops into art, music into part of our joy together, and he always saw the comedy in tragedy.” Gildiner’s memoir will have readers in tears of laughter and loss right up to the nail-biting conclusion when she is seduced by a handsome priest at the Rainbow Inn.Įach of the book’s thirteen chapters begin with black and white photographs or drawings, as if opening the pages of a family album and is devoted to a memorable person or event.Ĭhapter one is about Roy, a Black, illiterate delivery driver for McClure’s Drugs, Cathy’s father’s pharmacy where at four she is put to work full-time to remedy her hyperactive nature.
Too Close to the Falls, Catherine Gildiner’s award-winning memoir about her unconventional childhood in the sleepy town of Lewiston, New York in the ’50s will have readers holding onto their seats as feisty Cathy McClure hangs out at Shim-Shacks tavern on the edge of the Tuscarora reservation as a minor, delivers medicine through a snowstorm, and sleds down a steep escarpment toward the icy waters of Niagara.
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