In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden
By Kathleen Cambor
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23
ISBN 0374165378

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Like many readers, I love a cliff-hanger, love choosing a side or predicting an outcome, love the suspense until the final, I mean the really final moment, when the ending is at last revealed. So why, while reading Kathleen Cambor's In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden, was I spellbound, transfixed, when I already knew the ending? The novel is based on the Johnstown, Pennsylvania, flood in 1889 that ³claimed one of every nine² when the South Fork Dam burst, destroying the town and tallying up a death toll of over 2,200.

I mulled this conundrum, until I finally realized it was because I knew the ending, because I knew the tragedy that lay in wait, that I was so enthralled.

In less capable hands, this setting might have spawned a sleeper, but Cambor takes us back in time and place so deftly, infuses her characters with the breath of life so convincingly, that the prescient knowledge of the bursting dam evokes a kind of sickening awe -- a wondrous horror -- a feeling for the full import of the story that goes well beyond the impact of historical facts and figures. It's like watching the movie Titanic. We know in the end the ship goes down. We know lives will be lost. But that knowledge is all the more portentous as we witness the passions and fears, the hopes and hates, the loves and longings of people like us, caught in the throes of living.

With a Dickensian flair for scene changes, Cambor brings us into the diverse worlds of the poorer townsfolk, the marginally rich and the unfathomably wealthy with well-crafted, complex characterizations and a discerning eye for telling detail. We are equally privy to the soul-searching struggles of Civil War veteran Frank Fallon, the life-changing summer romance between Nora Talbot and Frank's son, Daniel, and the machinations of the heart of industrial giants like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick as Cambor weaves her well-imagined tale.

The South Fork Dam may have burst with sudden ferocious force on one particular Memorial Day in 1889, but In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden captures the scope and breadth of an era; it will take you back in time, immerse you in a world of steam engines and steel, and drop you back at your station -- the present -- still immersed in wonder at the complexities of life.

Linda Stankard writes from Cookeville, Tennessee.