![[what I read in 2002]](/images/review_banner.gif)
The Sweet Hereafter ::
When people are hit with an unimaginable tragedy, they contort themselves in ways that would seem impossible. They go through a denial, the fight with themselves and with each other over what happened, they do everything they can to ignore the awful truth that lies before all of them. They do it because to face the truth is to face an utter collapse of hope, and of life.
That was the case with the people of Sam Dent, New York, when a school bus carrying fourteen of the town’s children runs off the road in a snowstorm and crashes into a quarry’s undrained sand pit. All the children die except one, and she is left paralyzed. The event traumatizes the town, and those parents who have not gone off into an internal landscape of hopelessness and death have gone on a legal rampage that is fueled by a New York City Lawyer who is convinced someone is to blame for what happened.
The narrative does not lapse into the author’s fanciful dreams of the strength of humanity in trying times, nor does it seem to speculate on the psychology of the characters who are fighting with what happened. It is always believable, it created a world I could see as clearly as I can my own. I realized when I finished reading this book, how literature can be an important guide as we try to navigate the tragedies of our own lives.
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