Book Review: After the Fog

by: Kathleen Shoop

Available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble

Synopsis:
The sins of the mother...

In the steel mill town of Donora, Pennsylvania, site of the infamous 1948 "killing smog," headstrong nurse Rose Pavlesic tends to her family and neighbors. Controlling and demanding, she's created a life that reflects everything she missed growing up as an orphan. She's even managed to keep her painful secrets hidden from her loving husband, dutiful children, and large extended family.

When a stagnant weather pattern traps poisonous mill gasses in the valley, neighbors grow sicker and Rose's nursing obligations thrust her into conflict she never could have fathomed. Consequences from her past collide with her present life, making her once clear decisions as gray as the suffocating smog. As pressure mounts, Rose finds she's not the only one harboring lies.

When the deadly fog finally clears, the loss of trust and faith leaves the Pavlesic family-and the whole town-splintered and shocked.

With her new perspective, can Rose finally forgive herself and let her family's healing begin?

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I'm so impressed with Kathleen Shoop. Her tasty novel, The Last Letter, was based on letters that were in her family. I admit it, I wondered if that was a one hit wonder...I'm sure authors have them too.

Nope, she's great. She took this very real tragedy that happened in Donora where there were 3 mills to service all the surrounding mines. Being in a valley that held onto fog, the smoke from the mills was held in place. It really made me ill reading about the people walking around in the poisonous fog. Unhealthy people died, healthy people became ill...for days no one could even see, driving...WALKING was dangerous, driving was impossible.

Then mixed in with that was Rose's life getting turned upside down. What a well written character that far too many women will relate too. Her husband and family were also given a great deal of depth. She lived with her husband, her teenage twins (boy/girl), brother-in-law with his wife and young son, and her husband's aged aunt & uncle. Very crowded, and while Rose and Henry worked hard for their own place something always comes up to prevent it.

The plot was full to bursting and the story read as though in a dream. I think its because we are observing a memory in the present tense. It was so engaging, I couldn't put it down. Did you read The Last Letter? If not, you should get that and this. Both are wonderful stories.

Guest Blog - Kathleen Shoop

I’m so honored to contribute a post at Lilac Wolf and Stuff. Thank you for the opportunity! I was asked what inspired me to write this story and create the characters. The first part is easy—I listened to my mother. Well, not at first. I was looking for a historical disaster to use as the backdrop for my next book and she suggested I explore Donora, Pennsylvania’s “killing smog” of 1948. The what?

Even spending nearly my whole life up the road a bit from Donora, I’d never heard of such a thing. When I finally looked into it, the true facts of the tragedy blew me away. A temperature inversion trapped the steel and zinc mill smoke and gasses in the valley over the course of a week, killing twenty people and sickening another 6,000 or so! How could I not know about this? Turns out, many people who live in Western, Pennsylvania aren’t familiar with the “five days of fog.” I knew I had my backdrop!

When it came to creating the characters, I interviewed many Donora residents—past and present—to confirm whether my experiences with steel-town men and women were similar to those who might have lived in Donora in 1948. Once I confirmed that the types of people I knew from other mill-towns like Etna, where my dad grew up, were similar to Donorans, I began to craft the people of the book.

I knew my women would be grittier than expected for some readers, especially if a reader’s tie to mid-century women is limited to sanitized TV shows. I knew my men would be more complex, perhaps, than expected. Henry Pavlesic, Rose’s husband is quintessential Western, PA in many ways—a steel man who logged many years as an athlete, who just wants peace and quiet in his home. But like many people, he has squashed dreams. He regrets forgoing college for a pro baseball career and so he fills his empty moments with Auden’s poetry, quoting him ‘til his wife is up to her ears with irritation. Yes, I knew someone like that—a mill-working poet. Though Henry and his male relatives are coarse and abrupt in their ways with each other, they have slivers or threads or full-out parts of them that are more refined and gentle—the way most people are, multi-faceted.

I took a bit of a risk in how I crafted Rose and Henry’s marriage experience. Rose lived a neglected, ugly childhood, but she’s one of the lucky people whose scrapes with the evils of the world left her crusty, not broken. She and Henry are physically intimate. They’re language of love is in the way they touch: Rose tending to Henry’s slag-burn while he pats her butt, the way they dance, that their sex life is utilitarian more than tantalizing, but it’s alive. Their relationship lives in their touch. Of course, when real crises arise, you can’t touch your way out of them. Rose and Henry find out just how capable they are of true acts of love when faced with threats to the very core of their family.

Mostly, I kept in mind that although the perception of American culture in one era might be that it is more buttoned up or repressed or perceived as “cleaner,” than in another era, people are generally the same—flawed and courageous and wonderful all at once.

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You can purchase After the Fog at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

You can also learn more about Kathleen Shoop at her:
Website / Facebook / Twitter

I also want to give a shout out to BookSparksPR for allowing me to review After the Fog (coming Wednesday) and getting Kathleen and myself together for this guest blog. If you are an author and need a PR company, I would contact them, I have been working with them for over a year and they are nothing but professional and always nice to work with.

--Lilac Wolf