A book that stops you in your tracks. Banks handles an amazing range of narrators with amazing deftness.

Nothing about grief is simple. For people, families, or communities. Banks writes it all here. ( )

This is a haunting book about the aftermath of a school bus crash that took the lives of fourteen children and left others injured, some irrevocably. It takes place in a small town in upstate New York named Sam Dent. There is shock, profound grief, followed by a need to find the responsible party. Personal injury attorneys descend on the small town to represent the families, many attending the funerals of the children to make contact with their parents.

It is told from different perspectives. These include the bus driver, Dolores Driscoll, who escaped unscathed, but shattered by the enormity of the accident; Mitchell Stephens, a NYC attorney with a daughter fighting an addiction; Billy Ansel, a widowed Vietnam veteran whose twins both died in the crash; and Nichole Burnell, the fourteen-year-old girl who will never walk again and has been the victim of her father's sexual abuse for years.

This is a book whose stories will stay with me. The small town itself becomes a character when the inhabitants slowly come together following the tragedy. ( )

This is a beautiful and masterfully written book. Banks employs multiple narrators in a way quite unlike other writers, and the story is set up to move along at just the right pace. Devoid any excessive sentimentality, while writing about a near-unspeakable tragedy in a small town, he does a terrific job of sketching the various townfolk of a small by-the-side town in upstate New York. The people seem real, the emotions seem real and there is nary a false note. Highly, highly recommended ( )

There's a set piece where a man has to give a tracheotomy that I still recall--even twenty years after finishing the book. ( )

Powerful writing about parenting, and the experiencing the sorrow for the lost of a child through death or addiction. ( )