Based on a real school bus tragedy that took place in the town of Alton, Texas in 1989, resulting in the deaths of 21 children and the injuries of 49 more, The Sweet Hereafter is as sad and moving a story as you would imagine it to be.  

This is my second time through, and the only novel I've read to this point by Russell Banks, but he has that rare knack reminiscent of my favorite author Stephen King, of rendering characters in a way that's incredibly vivid and authentic, with just a few short sentences. For example, describing one of the kids who boards the ill-fated bus, "He had a round burnt-orange babyface with a perpetual peaceful smile on it. as if someone had just told him a terrific joke and he was telling it to himself all over again." Banks also really captures the scope and severe beauty of the Adirondacks in winter.  And I say that as someone familiar with that impressive and often overlooked landscape.  He also does an excellent job rendering a small town hunkered down in its isolation, compounded by grief, and the seedy underbelly that's often a part of such communities.

"It's dark up there, closed-in by mountains of shadow and a blanketing early nightfall, but at the same time the space is huge, endless, almost like being at sea...that makes you feel simultaneously surrounded by the darkness and released into a world much larger than any you've dealt with before. It's a landscape that controls you, sits you down and says, Shut up, pal, I'm in charge here."

The book is told through four different points of view: the school bus driver, the flashy New York City lawyer who comes to the small town of Sam Dent with vengeance on his mind, the devastated father who lost two children in the disaster, and the fourteen-year-old cheerleader and Harvest Festival Queen who is left paralyzed.  While I prefer some of the perspectives to the others, all of the pieces are still incredibly moving and all of them are devastating, but, really, how could they be anything else?