Rating: 
Summary: A MAJOR LETDOWN
Review: After the achingly beautiful and heartfelt "The Book of Mercy," Kathleen Cambor has thrust "In Sunlight in a Beautiful Garden " on us. I would guess that the idea of "novelizing" an actual event seemed like a good one to Cambor but in her hands this effort falls flat even though there are some beautifully written passages as in Julia's thoughts after the death of 2 of her children: "..the charm, the tenderness, the wit she'd always counted on, that her mother always said were part of her good character, had disappeared like so much smoke. She was left hollowed, fractured, parched." What I'm saying is that Kathleen Cambor is a fine writer but her talents are not suited to this particular subject. What happens is, because there is so much exposition needed to propell this story, that Cambor's talent is squandered. "In the Sunlight in a Beautiful Garden" is a noble failure but a failure nonetheless.
Rating: 
Summary: In Sunlight in a Beautiful Garden
Review: As a career reading teacher, I know that disasters have a real fascination. Kathleen Cambor has built on an exciting historical event, the Johnstown flood, and brought it into our lives through her detailed research and poetic creation of the people involved in this unforgettable disaster. Her writing style is pure and beautiful. The impact of the tragedy is so powerful that it moves one to want to visit the site as soon as possible. She has brought history to real life. Read it!
Rating: 
Summary: Just OK
Review: As a history prof, I see lots of other historical novels that put this one to shame.
Rating: 
Summary: Life before an epic catastrophe...
Review: At the end of the 19th Century, America is a nation of vast opportunity and evolving values, certainly obsessed with the vast fortunes amassed by the likes of Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Mellon. Their private resort above the industrialized town of Johnstown, PA, is a jewel in the crown of the vast wealth of these Robber Barons. The South Fork Fishing and Hunting Lodge features a man-made lake braced by an ill-repaired dam that ultimately imperils the town resting at its valley floor.Using personal detail to humanize this disaster, Cambor introduces complex characters from Johnstown as well as one family who summers for a brief two weeks each year at South Fork, albeit a family not of the highest level of that very particular pecking order. In Johnstown we meet Julia of the broken spirit and her husband Frank, helpless against life's random cruelties, their proud son Daniel, and Grace, a runaway from an unbearably lonely life. Representing South Fork is the idealistic Nora, a child of fortune who reaches beyond her personal limitations before everything changes forever. The novel actually ends with the flood, a vast surge of water from the ruptured dam, unleashing death and devastation that Memorial Day, May 30, 1889, obliterating Johnstown in minutes. I confess I wanted more detail about the actual flood and its physical consequences, who survived and who took responsibility. This is but a small complaint in a rich novel of American life on the cusp of a new century, a time when the American Dream still twinkles in the eye of the working man and when hard work promises a guarantee, security for a man's family after a life of labor. Detail is crafted into every page, days lived in hope and reason, pride and dignity. But, lest I wax too nostalgic, their time is cut short by nature's wrath and the enormous cost of privilege for the few. The novel opens with this quote, setting the tone for the quiet unfolding of catastrophe: "I have been watching you; you were there, unconcerned perhaps, but with the strange distraught air of someone forever expecting a great misfortune, in sunlight, in a beautiful garden" (Maurice Maeterlinck). Indeed, such disasters do create a sense of vigilance, of dreams discarded and the sad loss of innocence.
Rating:
Summary: tale of woe...........
Review: Before I get to the particulars of this novel I just want to say how much Kathleen Cambor's book touched me. I found that I could not put it down. I knew before I started to read it that it was doomed in terms of the way it would end. There would simply be no happy fairytale ending for any of the characters in it, whether they were the rich who congregated at the club, or the poor who lead fairly desperate lives below. However, in hopes of perhaps coming to grips with some of the history of this tragic event I worthy of my time and effort. On reflection I guess I felt like someone who picks up a book about passengers on the unsinkable TITANIC.....hoping perhaps that this time the ship will somehow miraculously stay afloat. From the very start the reader is drawn into both worlds, the robber barons and their wealth, and the families who are just trying to get on below in the valley. We come to know the Fallons, many of the wealthy including Frick and Carnegie, and the woman who left all wealth behind because she needed desperately to find a life for herself, Grace Macintyre, the town librarian. How the club affects all these lives is interesting, but the real value of the book is how it draws us in and keeps our attention on their lives as they draw nearer and nearer to the disaster that awaits them. I was tempted many times to just flip ahead and find out what happened to them all at the end, knowing that none of them would survive the disaster, even if they walked away. One of the more touching parts of the character development was the daughter of the lawyer, Nora Talbot, who embodied innocence and at the same time the essence of entitlement, that those below saw as the reason for the disaster. It is a haunting book. It fully deserves the accolades it has received to date.
Rating:
Summary: Sepia-toned slice of life
Review: Brava! to Kathleen Cambor for her lyrical, achingly insightful
exploration of a tragedy that did not have to happen. She
transcends the best of historical fiction (my favorite genre)
with a truly poetic combining of fact and fiction, character
and plot, action and contemplation that is truly mesmerizing.
Her luminous prose far surpasses any I've read recently
(including several very well-received books). But her greatest
accomplishment is to make her reader experience the gut-
wrenching, profound sense of loss that people of 1889 (or of any other time with great national disaster--such as September 11th) must have experienced. As with a sepia-toned photograph in
sunlight, in a beautiful garden--our reaction to nostalgia
mixed with beauty mixed with longing is almost unbearable.
Rating: 
Summary: Nothing beautiful about this book
Review: Don't waste your time or money!
This book was a nightmare to read, probably the worst book I have ever read.
The storyline never ties together. It was an interesting topic and should have been very good, but this author did not pull it together enough to make sense out of what was going on from one page to the next.
I struggled through it because our bookclub had chose it this month. I have never written a review before, but am writing this in hopes that no one else will have to go through the torture of reading this book.
Rating:
Summary: Dreams of Yesterday
Review: I cannot give you information about the author as I could not find any, except that she is an author who has won several awards and who, by the nature of this book, does meticulous research before she writes about a subject. In this book she captures the imagination with her portrayals of innocence in all its splendor shining next to the most infamous type of greed, a greed that never considers the effects of ones own greed on others. The characters are all fully drawn and you either love them or pity them or despise them. Regardless they tell the story of the main character, and her fairy tale childhood so that you almost walk in the woods with her and share her first feelings of grown love. And, when it comes to the climactic scenes of the Johnstown flood-you are there also. This is book that I really enjoyed and hated to finish.
Rating:
Summary: A beautifully written book!
Review: I don't recall ever hearing much about the Johnstown Flood in 1889 and I am embarrassed to say so. However, I am glad that I had an opportunity to read this beautifully written book. And I was able to get a small glimpse of what the flood was about over 200 years ago. Kathleen Cambor writes with prose on a select few characters whose lives are entertwined with the Club and Johnstown. She also writes with passion ~~ diviluging subtle sides to the rich men involved in this tragedy as well as men who protested against the building of the lake which ended up overflowing and killing almost 2,000 people during a Memorial Day rainstorm. There is Nora, the daughter of one of the lawyers who protested for the repairs on the dam ~~ whose life became entangled with Daniel Fallon, who lost his whole family in the flood. There is Andrew Mellon pining away for his dead financee; Andrew Carnegie entrapped by his mother's rule; Henry Clay Frick whose main concern is his comfort and prosperity. Cambor brings them all to life within this novel. If you are a fan of historical fiction like I am ~~ I highly recommend reading this book. It will spark an interest in a tragedy that happened long ago and it was a tragedy that could have been prevented ~~ if men weren't so obstinate in denying that there was a problem. Even today, one cannot still imagine the depth of human lives lost ~~ it's too much to comprehend. But Cambor gave some of the victims voices in which they could share their lives, dreams, goals and aspirations. You can hear their voices haunting you as you read this book. I think this is a must-read. It's not slow-paced like I feared ~~ it was very moving and the story sweeps you along with the voices and soon, you realize the tragedy is not just in the fact that the dam failed ~~ but in the fact that men simply don't care. 4-6-02
Rating:
Summary: Yawn ... this book put me to sleep!
Review: I had the bad luck to be stuck on a 5-hour flight with only this book. All I can say is that is was one of the better sleep aids I have tried. Acording to the summary in the jacket, it was supposed to chronicle the lives of some of the people who were devastated by the South Fork flood in 1889. What the blurbs and reviews fail to mention is that the flood doesn't actually happen until the last few pages of the book. Leading up to the flood, the reader is dragged through a few hundred pages of vapid, shallow anecdotes of the lead characters' lives, which are at best difficult to follow and at worst utterly mind-numbing. I forced myself to finish it for lack of anything better to do, but would not recommend it to any but the most starved for diversion. And, by the way, I am a native Pennsylvanian, so I really expected better. Unless you are really in the mood to yawn, save your money and borrow this dog from the library!
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