Too Close To The Fallls by Catherine Gildiner ✔✔✔✔

I've been thinking about this book for a long time - I believe I heard Gildiner, who is a practising psychologist in Toronto, reading an excerpt from her sequel to this particular memoir, entitled After the Falls - and finally downloaded it to my Kindle, where it has sat for about a year or more.

Since reading Dickens, I've been somewhat anchorless in my reading.  I tried A Tale Of Two Cities, and I do intend to finish it, but there were several others, too, which I attempted but didn't find them speaking to me at all.  I usually flow from one book to the next and I really didn't know why this gap in my reading had occured.  I still don't, but I did decide that going back to non-fiction was probably best, so I picked up Too Close To The Falls, and was instantly captivated.

Catherine grew up  in Lewiston, New York, which is very close to Niagara Falls. Her father was a busy and highly-respected druggist there, her mother was - well, a very different mother - and Catherine seems to have raised herself, even though she had a close relationship with both her parents.  A family doctor thinks Catherine doesn't have enough to do - she's almost ADD, so her Dad puts her to work at the drugstore when she's only four, and this is the first chapter of the book.

The book is her story, of course, but she has a complete chapter for various colorful people in Lewiston, including Roy, her driver when she's delivering prescriptions, her mother, Sister Agnese, as well as some of her friends.  Many times I was laughing so hard I cried - for example, Catherine writes about Elvis' first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, how the sisters told them all it would be a sin to watch him, which only made it even more intruiging, and then how Sullivan announced prior to the show that Elvis would be televised from the waist up only , so the sisters told them they could watch the show with their parents.  So Catherine's watching the show and telling everyone how Elvis is "sinning from the waist down" - she hasn't figured out what sin is anyway, but wants to appear knowledgeable for her guests.

And this was what was so captivating about the book - she's so innocent, and knows absolutely nothing about most things, so it's her reaction to events and people that is so humorous. And she also has a very inoocent approach to matters of faith, and is constantly the despair of the nuns and priests - absolutely irreverent!

I'm looking forward to the sequel - I do know her mother died quite young, so I think the book will focus on that. This was one of the best memoirs I've read since A Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls.