In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden

This is a book to savor, a touching romance overcast by the looming disaster of the Johnstown flood, so beautifully written that the characters remain in the mind long after the pages are closed. Kathleen Cambor peeks into the lives of the rich and famous industrialists of the late 1800's - Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon, Henry Clay Frick - all members of the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club. This summer retreat for the wealthy was created by re-building the South Fork dam. There were questions about the dam's stability from the beginnings of the project, however these were swept aside due to the importance of the club's members. The wealthy members do not give a thought to the people down below in Johnstown as they enjoy the pleasures of an idyllic locale.Ms. Cambor also touchingly re-creates the lives of those living in the doomed city of Johnstown. Some few will survive the flood which took the lives of 2200 and was the worst industrial tragedy of its time. Although the book climaxes predictably with the flood, there are surprises in the aftermath.

The wonderful thing about the book is that although we know how, and with what event, it will end, that ending comes as both a surprise and a climax. And almost an afterthought. Cambor has deftly interwoven a historian's concern for details and research (and an accurate portrayal of the historical figures who were members of the club) with a novelist's ability to create fictional characters out of whole cloth. We become interested in their lives, and we wonder (here is the suspenseful part) exactly who will live and who will die in the predictable climax. In addition, Cambor take's a poet's delight in crafting beautiful sentences. I couldn't put the book down, but neither did I want it to end.

In Sunlight, In a Beautiful Garden by Kathleen Cambor is a novelization of the events leading up to the horrific Johnstown Flood of 1889 in Pennsylvania when over 2200 people lost their lives. After a night of heavy rains, the South Fork Dam had broken, sending 20 million tons of water crashing down the narrow valley into Johnstown. Carrying huge chunks of debris, the wall of flood water was as high as 60 feet, moving downhill at 40 miles per hour, destroying everything in its path.In this mostly character-driven novel, the author manages to intimately acquaint us with many of the residents of the area and those who were visitors. In fact, she has managed to produce somewhat of a social history of that time and place. It is obvious that Cambor has done extensive research because, as the reader, I felt that the great attention to detail really put me into Johnstown in1889 as she set the stage for the disaster that was to come.The South Fork dam which burst was below the site of a "gentlemen's club", The South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club, started by many of the wealthy industrialists of that time who lived in Pittsburgh (Frick, Carnegie, Mellon) and used by them as a mostly summer getaway.Fourteen miles up the Little Conemaugh River, on whose banks Johnstown was built, a three-mile long lake was precariously held on the side of a mountain - 450 feet higher than Johnstown - by the old South Fork Dam. The dam had been neglected and poorly maintained, and every spring there was fear that the dam might not hold. But it always had, and the supposed threat became something of a standing joke around town.Many residents of Johnstown knew of the terrible condition of the dam, as did some of the visitors, but their attempts to draw attention to the problems and the potential for disaster were in vain. It appears that the people who lived in the area just assumed that those of privilege and wealth took good care of the property, very much an assumption of "noblesse oblige" which never really happened.The author makes it clear that those of wealth, the patrons of the club, were the "bad guys" who had no interest in the people who lived below the dam....they were only concerned with the little world they had created in the mountains. They had bought the abandoned reservoir, minimally repaired the old dam, dangerously raised the lake level, and built cottages and a clubhouse in their secretive retreat. There was no question about the shoddy condition of the dam, but no successful lawsuits were ever brought against club members for its failure and the resulting deaths.Cambor manages to bring these people and the fictional town residents to life by relating their personal histories like one would peel back the layers of an onion...slowly and cautiously, revealing parts of their pasts in succeeding chapters. As a reader, one comes to really care about these people and what happens to them-- Frank Fallon, a Civil War veteran, and his family; James Talbot, an att

Since 1889, many novels have been written that have used the 1889 Johnstown Flood as a historical backdrop...the first being written just a few months after the disaster. Quite simply, this is one of the best.I have been professionally studying the Johnstown Flood for almost a decade, and I am quite impressed with the research the author did, and the excellent effort to present the results of that research in a most compelling way.She has created characters that you end up caring about a great deal. In fact, you'll likely be thinking about those characters long after you finish the book. She has almost perfectly captured the emotions and anguish that affected so many in the valley before and after the Flood. Quite importantly, you realize that there is indeed more to this story than most history books will tell you.You will also be refreshed at the beautifully crafted writing...something that is so rare these days in the world of fiction.Just remember, this is a piece of fiction. I encourage you to also read David McCullough's masterful 1968 book, 'The Johnstown Flood' for an excellent treatment of the Flood story.

In this rich and beautiful novel, Kathleen Cambor takes greatest industrial disaster in U.S. history and makes is heartrendingly immediate and terribly suspenseful. Her cast of characters, from the wealthiest men in the United States to factory workers, are so fully imagined that you'll be unable to leave the book without knowing whether or not they survived the bursting of the dam that had held the river back for decades.Cambor does a lot of artful stage-setting, developing the reader's understanding of Johnstown's particular location and the construction of the dam through character. The beauty of the Pennsylvania mountain landscape is expressed by a young girl whose love for the outdoors makes her the only person from the lake to connect with someone from the town below. That young man is sparking the first unionization movement in the factories. His father and mother are both drawn to the town's librarian, a woman with a secret who helps prepare their son for college.When the dam broke it took almost an hour for the wall of water to reach Johnstown. By the time it did, the force of the flood had dragged locomotives, houses, and corpses with it. The sound must have been terrifying and there was no where to go to escape it. Cambor's handling of the disaster is masterful; she tells you enough about the fate of her characters, but not so much as to break your heart."In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden" is a novel of complexity and grace, and it works on all levels.