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__caropi's review against another edition
5.0
AMAZING. Everyone go out and buy it.
Craig Davidson is a master of his craft. He tells such a gritty tale that often sent chills through me. He choreographs movement through words so elegantly it never feels laboured or heavy handed. It's simply perfect.
By the end the book reminded me of the film The Departed and I was totally okay with it.
I'm gushing. How do I even form sentences?
If you're looking for an amazing, modern, Canadian book. PLEASE pick this one up. You won't regret it. Even if the description of the book doesn't interest you, READ IT. I picked the book up after Craig came to sign copies for my publishing class and was sceptical, but once I cracked that spine I was hooked.
You will be too.
Craig Davidson is a master of his craft. He tells such a gritty tale that often sent chills through me. He choreographs movement through words so elegantly it never feels laboured or heavy handed. It's simply perfect.
By the end the book reminded me of the film The Departed and I was totally okay with it.
I'm gushing. How do I even form sentences?
If you're looking for an amazing, modern, Canadian book. PLEASE pick this one up. You won't regret it. Even if the description of the book doesn't interest you, READ IT. I picked the book up after Craig came to sign copies for my publishing class and was sceptical, but once I cracked that spine I was hooked.
You will be too.
lostinagoodread's review against another edition
4.0
This review and others can be found on Cozy Up With A Good Read
I absolutely love being able to feature Canadian books on this blog, and CATARACT CITY is such a strong book and I am glad to see it on the longlist for the Giller because it definitely deserves recognition. This is a story about a strong friendship between two boys that have been through so much together.
I really enjoyed the history of Niagara Falls inserted into this book, there was so much I didn't know about the people that lived there, and I had no idea it was called "Cataract City". It's great when I can learn history in a book like this. This book is told from both Owen and Duncan's perspectives as they are now and as they remember the past and what led to where they are.
I was really intrigued by these two characters, they are both very flawed and that makes their story interesting to follow to see where they take their lives from how they grew up. Owen and Duncan experience something in childhood that bonds their friendship and yet also breaks their friendship when their parents decide that they need time away from each other. Over the years there are things that continually bring these two together even though they are on different paths.
I loved that this book takes readers into a darker part of Niagara Falls with dog-racing, fighting, and smuggling of items. This is a Niagara Falls that I never thought existed and I'm interested to really learn more about this dark side. This is real life and it is scary to know that this existed.
Craig Davidson has brought these characters to life and really shown a beautiful friendship that is able to withstand many issues, they are brothers and help each other out. I loved their interactions with one another as their friendship grows and falls apart, and yet still they come back together. I'm happy to have read this book because it really makes me appreciate the friendships I have in my life and I want to hold onto those.
This is a great book with a lot of emotions running around as these two boys grow to find themselves and what they want to do with their future.
I absolutely love being able to feature Canadian books on this blog, and CATARACT CITY is such a strong book and I am glad to see it on the longlist for the Giller because it definitely deserves recognition. This is a story about a strong friendship between two boys that have been through so much together.
I really enjoyed the history of Niagara Falls inserted into this book, there was so much I didn't know about the people that lived there, and I had no idea it was called "Cataract City". It's great when I can learn history in a book like this. This book is told from both Owen and Duncan's perspectives as they are now and as they remember the past and what led to where they are.
I was really intrigued by these two characters, they are both very flawed and that makes their story interesting to follow to see where they take their lives from how they grew up. Owen and Duncan experience something in childhood that bonds their friendship and yet also breaks their friendship when their parents decide that they need time away from each other. Over the years there are things that continually bring these two together even though they are on different paths.
I loved that this book takes readers into a darker part of Niagara Falls with dog-racing, fighting, and smuggling of items. This is a Niagara Falls that I never thought existed and I'm interested to really learn more about this dark side. This is real life and it is scary to know that this existed.
Craig Davidson has brought these characters to life and really shown a beautiful friendship that is able to withstand many issues, they are brothers and help each other out. I loved their interactions with one another as their friendship grows and falls apart, and yet still they come back together. I'm happy to have read this book because it really makes me appreciate the friendships I have in my life and I want to hold onto those.
This is a great book with a lot of emotions running around as these two boys grow to find themselves and what they want to do with their future.
silverneurotic's review against another edition
4.0
I won this book a few months ago with my old Goodreads account, but due to the backlog of books I had...it took awhile to read it, especially as I ended up deleted my account at a Goodreads soon after receiving this.
I had no idea what to expect with this book. I hadn't read any books by the author prior to this and when I finally picked it up...I was a bit apprehensive as I noticed a blurb by Chuck Paluniunk and figured that this was definitely going to be one of those kinds of books...you know, a book that you probably shouldn't eat while reading and forget about reading right before trying to sleep...
To my relief though, this book was not one long shock fest. Sure, there were a few instances in the book that I felt my stomach clench up in disgust by blood and gore...it was a surprisingly great coming of age book reminiscent of say, Stephen King's The Body (aka Stand by Me). I truly was impressed.
I had no idea what to expect with this book. I hadn't read any books by the author prior to this and when I finally picked it up...I was a bit apprehensive as I noticed a blurb by Chuck Paluniunk and figured that this was definitely going to be one of those kinds of books...you know, a book that you probably shouldn't eat while reading and forget about reading right before trying to sleep...
To my relief though, this book was not one long shock fest. Sure, there were a few instances in the book that I felt my stomach clench up in disgust by blood and gore...it was a surprisingly great coming of age book reminiscent of say, Stephen King's The Body (aka Stand by Me). I truly was impressed.
ladydewinter's review against another edition
4.0
Some books you come across in fairly straightforward ways, but some less so. I had never heard of Craig Davidson before his latest book, “Saturday Night Ghost Club” arrived at our store. It piqued my curiosity, I googled him and the ordered “Cataract City”, not knowing much about it.
And I have to say, it isn’t anything I would usually say “interests” me - but it one of those books that pull you inside them and make you forget you’re reading and leave you blinking disoriented when you realize you aren’t actually in Cataract City or lost in the woods surrounding it.
It’s about Duncan and Owen who grow together in Niagara Falls, called Cataract City by the locals. They both try to escape the limited life it offers, but the city doesn’t make it easy on them. There were some parts I had to psych myself up before reading on - the dog fights and the human fights and one instant of, um, let’s call it first aid - sometimes reading had the same sense living had to have for Duncan and Owen. They were very different characters from the ones I usually read about, and I had a sense of my perspective shifting in a necessary way, if that makes sense. I’m really glad I read it.
One thing that especially impressed me was how Davidson captured their shift from childhood to adulthood. It reminded me of Stephen King a little.
And I have to say, it isn’t anything I would usually say “interests” me - but it one of those books that pull you inside them and make you forget you’re reading and leave you blinking disoriented when you realize you aren’t actually in Cataract City or lost in the woods surrounding it.
It’s about Duncan and Owen who grow together in Niagara Falls, called Cataract City by the locals. They both try to escape the limited life it offers, but the city doesn’t make it easy on them. There were some parts I had to psych myself up before reading on - the dog fights and the human fights and one instant of, um, let’s call it first aid - sometimes reading had the same sense living had to have for Duncan and Owen. They were very different characters from the ones I usually read about, and I had a sense of my perspective shifting in a necessary way, if that makes sense. I’m really glad I read it.
One thing that especially impressed me was how Davidson captured their shift from childhood to adulthood. It reminded me of Stephen King a little.
itsmemoi's review against another edition
1.0
i was bored out of my mind skipped through most of the book, but reached the end idk why i didnt dnf it lmao
justineferon's review against another edition
4.0
Cataract City is a book detailing Niagara Falls’ underbelly of illegal reserve wrestling, dog racing, and nights at the bar ordering successive rounds of the area’s signature drink combo: a “shot of rye and a Hed.” It was the most aggressively masculine thing I’d ever read, and I barely reached the 100-page mark before abandoning it.
A week ago, I forced myself to pick up Cataract City again, bracing myself for another interminable slog through the woods with the book’s two protagonists, lifelong friends Owen Stuckey and Duncan Diggs. But while the lost-in-the-woods motif did reappear, my impatience didn’t. Somehow, I managed to get interested in this book about boys, booze, and making bail.
Cataract City isn’t named for a person, an event, or even a mood – it’s named for a town. And that’s an apt choice, because this book is perhaps the purest meditation on place I’ve ever read. Davidson has clearly thought deeply about how the place of your birth forms you, defines you, and can determine who you become. As he writes, “this city makes you; in a million little ways it makes you, and you can’t unmake yourself from it.”
I’ve always thought of Niagara Falls as tiny, tacky, and touristy (if I thought of it at all), but Davidson opened me up to a much more nuanced perspective on the place. He writes beautifully about two characters’ attempts to make sense of the setting they were born into. Below are a bunch of my favorite passages:
“As a kid, I found it tough to get a grip on my hometown’s place in the world. What could I compare it to? New York, Paris, Rome? It wasn’t even a dot on the globe. The nearest city, Toronto, was just a hazy smear across Lake Ontario, downtown skyscrapers like values on a bar graph. I figured most places must be a lot like where I lived: dominated by row houses with tarpaper roofs, squat apartment blocks painted the color of boiled meat, rusted playgrounds, butcher shops, and cramped corner stores where you could buy loose cigarettes for a dime apiece.”
“I saw how a city could sink into you, trapping its pulsing heart inside your own heart – except it never feels like a trap. A trap snags you out of nowhere, violently and without warning. But I know every inch of my trap, didn’t I? I knew the dirt path that led down under the Whirlpool Bridge to a fishing hole stocked with hungry bass. How to jump off the old train trestle in Chippewa and hit the rip of slack water so I could paddle safely to shore. Cataract City was like those fur-covered handcuffs you could get at Tinglers. The city of your birth was the softest trap imaginable. So soft you didn’t even feel how badly you were snared – how could it be a trap when you knew its every spring and tooth?”
“We all occupy our own square of space and time. We have our memories and no one else’s. We live one life, accumulating it in our minds as we go along. The city is part of that too. The city is networked into the memories of everyone who walks those same streets, who works at the same factories, who plays baseball on the same diamonds where the dust still hangs along the base-paths minutes after a player’s passage.”
“My dad said Cataract City is a pressure chamber: living was hard, so boys were forced to become men much faster. That pressure ingrained itself in bodies and faces. You’d see twenty-year-old men whose hands were stained permanently black with grease. Men just past 30 walking with a stoop. Forty year olds with forehead wrinkles as deep as the bark on a redwood. You didn’t age gracefully around here. You just got old.”
Beyond these sweeping stanzas, Cataract City is studded with lovely little bits of language. Davidson describes a bodybuilder as “freakishly muscular, a condom stuffed with walnuts,” captures “the wet, weeping smell of cinderblock walls,” and writes “life in the forest falls like a guillotine blade.”
Ultimately, Cataract City is a book about revenge, about identity, and about the hopes we have for ourselves. In this book, expectations are small, circumstances are hard to overcome, and life is a grind rather than a joy. Physical injury – in the form of smashed noses, ruined limbs, and knuckles worn to the bone from fighting – is inevitable. Working at the ‘Bisk is inevitable. Wishing to escape (but not escaping) is inevitable. This makes Cataract City – both the book and the place – both terribly depressing and wildly interesting. If you can get past the first 100 pages, that is!
A week ago, I forced myself to pick up Cataract City again, bracing myself for another interminable slog through the woods with the book’s two protagonists, lifelong friends Owen Stuckey and Duncan Diggs. But while the lost-in-the-woods motif did reappear, my impatience didn’t. Somehow, I managed to get interested in this book about boys, booze, and making bail.
Cataract City isn’t named for a person, an event, or even a mood – it’s named for a town. And that’s an apt choice, because this book is perhaps the purest meditation on place I’ve ever read. Davidson has clearly thought deeply about how the place of your birth forms you, defines you, and can determine who you become. As he writes, “this city makes you; in a million little ways it makes you, and you can’t unmake yourself from it.”
I’ve always thought of Niagara Falls as tiny, tacky, and touristy (if I thought of it at all), but Davidson opened me up to a much more nuanced perspective on the place. He writes beautifully about two characters’ attempts to make sense of the setting they were born into. Below are a bunch of my favorite passages:
“As a kid, I found it tough to get a grip on my hometown’s place in the world. What could I compare it to? New York, Paris, Rome? It wasn’t even a dot on the globe. The nearest city, Toronto, was just a hazy smear across Lake Ontario, downtown skyscrapers like values on a bar graph. I figured most places must be a lot like where I lived: dominated by row houses with tarpaper roofs, squat apartment blocks painted the color of boiled meat, rusted playgrounds, butcher shops, and cramped corner stores where you could buy loose cigarettes for a dime apiece.”
“I saw how a city could sink into you, trapping its pulsing heart inside your own heart – except it never feels like a trap. A trap snags you out of nowhere, violently and without warning. But I know every inch of my trap, didn’t I? I knew the dirt path that led down under the Whirlpool Bridge to a fishing hole stocked with hungry bass. How to jump off the old train trestle in Chippewa and hit the rip of slack water so I could paddle safely to shore. Cataract City was like those fur-covered handcuffs you could get at Tinglers. The city of your birth was the softest trap imaginable. So soft you didn’t even feel how badly you were snared – how could it be a trap when you knew its every spring and tooth?”
“We all occupy our own square of space and time. We have our memories and no one else’s. We live one life, accumulating it in our minds as we go along. The city is part of that too. The city is networked into the memories of everyone who walks those same streets, who works at the same factories, who plays baseball on the same diamonds where the dust still hangs along the base-paths minutes after a player’s passage.”
“My dad said Cataract City is a pressure chamber: living was hard, so boys were forced to become men much faster. That pressure ingrained itself in bodies and faces. You’d see twenty-year-old men whose hands were stained permanently black with grease. Men just past 30 walking with a stoop. Forty year olds with forehead wrinkles as deep as the bark on a redwood. You didn’t age gracefully around here. You just got old.”
Beyond these sweeping stanzas, Cataract City is studded with lovely little bits of language. Davidson describes a bodybuilder as “freakishly muscular, a condom stuffed with walnuts,” captures “the wet, weeping smell of cinderblock walls,” and writes “life in the forest falls like a guillotine blade.”
Ultimately, Cataract City is a book about revenge, about identity, and about the hopes we have for ourselves. In this book, expectations are small, circumstances are hard to overcome, and life is a grind rather than a joy. Physical injury – in the form of smashed noses, ruined limbs, and knuckles worn to the bone from fighting – is inevitable. Working at the ‘Bisk is inevitable. Wishing to escape (but not escaping) is inevitable. This makes Cataract City – both the book and the place – both terribly depressing and wildly interesting. If you can get past the first 100 pages, that is!
ladeeda's review against another edition
4.0
I, like a lot of reviews I've read on this book, had a hard time rating it. The story is compelling but a little heavy on description for my taste. The book is well written, Davidson is an artist but there were some glaring timeline errors which I already moaned about. The graphic animal cruelty was too much for me, I am an animal lover, especially dogs. I'm well aware of the cruelty animals suffer at the hand of man but I don't want to read about it for pleasure, in my spare time.
Also I have to call bullshit, to me this was a huge plot error; the van being left in the woods for Dunk and Owe to find many years later when they happen to be lost, again. Not very well researched, a van used in a kidnapping, found with a dead body wouldn't just be left behind with drugs inside. Which brings me to how the hell Owe got on the police force with his knee??? He couldn't play basketball because he was too slow and walked with a cane but he some how passes the intensive police physical. Give me a break. Not to mention police are fired for associating with criminals as friends, so... And I thought after they returned home from the woods the first time they learned they had gone the wrong way and would have saved themselves a lot of time if they had gone the opposite route? But the second time, leaving from the same van they have the same problem. I wanted to yell at them, "Idiots."
Also I have to call bullshit, to me this was a huge plot error; the van being left in the woods for Dunk and Owe to find many years later when they happen to be lost, again. Not very well researched, a van used in a kidnapping, found with a dead body wouldn't just be left behind with drugs inside. Which brings me to how the hell Owe got on the police force with his knee??? He couldn't play basketball because he was too slow and walked with a cane but he some how passes the intensive police physical. Give me a break. Not to mention police are fired for associating with criminals as friends, so... And I thought after they returned home from the woods the first time they learned they had gone the wrong way and would have saved themselves a lot of time if they had gone the opposite route? But the second time, leaving from the same van they have the same problem. I wanted to yell at them, "Idiots."
booktwitcher23's review against another edition
3.0
Very brutal, and very much a male dominated read.
shanz77's review against another edition
5.0
This book is outstanding. I have been a fan of Davidson's work for a long time and this novel is a stunner. Beautifully written. It is gritty and dreamlike at points. It gave me what I wanted from Davidson's work and more. An absolute must read and I can't recommend it more.
thelittlerusticreader's review against another edition
4.0
This book was fantastic. I was sent an uncorrected proof many months ago as part of a First Reads giveaway and just picked it up a few days ago. It tells the story of two boys on the brink of adolescence, their journey into adulthoood, in Cataract City. The author does not show the tourist side of the City, but draws the curtain on the shadowy, somewhat seedy existence that many who have ever lived in a blue collar town can relate to. His writing is gritty, even emotional, colourful, and descriptive. It was not a "I couldn't put it down" title... but the characters drew me in, flaws and all, or maybe because of their imperfections. It is not a "clean" read - if you prefer your reads to skip the swearing and some adult references, probably not for you. Lots of drama, low places, and a tumultuous camaraderie. Great read!