After The Falls: Coming of Age In The Sixties by Catherine Gildiner ✔✔✔

I requested this book through Inter-Library Loan - I'm glad I didn't purchase it, because I didn't find it as engaging as Too Close To The Falls.  It certainly illustrates coming of age in the sixties, though - alienation from her father, teenage angst, discovering the facts of life in a thoroughly terrifying manner, trying marijuana, having her first relationship, her jobs throughout high school, her involvement in the Civil Rights movement, and later a brush with SNCC, the more radical group, the unhappy ending of a long-term relationship.

Her relationship with her father was probably the focus of the book, beginning with their move to Boston because of losing his business, his trying to deal with her discovering "boys", his later illness, with the necessity of her taking away his driver's license, and then his death.  Yet through it all, she has a high regard for her father, and her comments about the relationship between her parents indicates he was a good man, a good citizen.

There are some interesting stories - the party where she and a friend witnessed a gang rape through a closet door, her being sent to New York City to speak to various organizations about her prize-winning essay, as well as the incident which prompted the essay in the first place.  Just not as many belly laughs as the first one, and frankly some of her adventures were so "out there" I wondered if they were actually true.

We learned in her first book that her mother died of cancer, and this was never alluded to in this segment, so I'm assuming there'll be another memoir.  I'll read it - but maybe re-read the first one before I start it.