Fifty years after an earthen dam collapsed sending a thirty foot wall of raging destruction down on the city of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Pamela McRae looks back on the tragedy. The flood wiped out Pam’s fondest hopes: her brother and her fiancé were killed. Her mother is locked in catatonic hysteria. Her father, torn apart by the flood’s affect on his family, just walks away, leaving Pam poverty stricken and alone, to care for a mother who may never recover. Then Davy Hughes, Pam’s dead fiancé, reappears and, instead of being the answer to her prayers, further complicates her life. Someone is seeking revenge on the owners of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, the Pittsburgh millionaires who owned the failed dam, and Pam thinks Davy might have something to do with it. Waterproof, set in Johnstown two years after the flood, examines how people react to tragedy. Do they recover from physical injury only to succumb to the psychological affects? Or do they run away? Do they rise to the challenge and become better people or give in to their rage and seek revenge? For the people of Johnstown, survivors of the flood, it became the measure of their character. Determined to get past the tragedy and get on with her life, Pam spurns self-pity. She will not be defined by the flood. In this decades-deep story of loss and struggle against loss, we find a heroine to respect and a path to recovery.
Waterproof
$4.99 – $14.95
A novel of the 1889 Johnstown Flood, the worst disaster in American history until Pearl Harbor. On May 31, 1889, an earthen dam on the property of a group of Pittsburgh millionaires in the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania, collapsed, sending a thirty-foot wall of raging destruction down on the city of Johnstown. More than two thousand people were killed and the city was virtually wiped out. Fifty years later, Pamela McRae looks back on the tragedy. The flood wiped out Pam’s fondest hopes: her brother and her fiancé were killed.
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4 reviews for Waterproof
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Evelyn –
Great story about survivors of the Johnstown Flood and a small town newspaper business that carries on into the 1930″s. Interesting characters and a story that keeps you reading from chapter one till the last page. I don’t like going into too much detail about the story and possibly taking away any element of enjoyment before one would start reading. I enjoyed this book very much!
Sharon C. –
I grew up in Johnstown, so I enjoyed the references to places I knew. I had always heard of the personal tragedies suffered because of the flood and this book depicts
the human toll as well as the anger against the wealthy members of the fishing and hunting club. Other readers were bothered by the flashbacks in the book, but I was pleased with how the author handled these. Overall, I felt it was a compelling, well written book and I’m happy to have found a new author.
Lzyblyzzt –
This book was so hard to put down.
The Johnstown flood and its aftermath are a black eye on the American past, an incident in musty history books that’s overdue for exposure to fresh air and daylight.
Fiction is finally catching up with non-fiction in “Waterproof.” The story unfolds in a series of flashbacks, gracefully written to ease the reader through the drama of the shock, heartbreak and loss brought on by the monstrous flood.
The foresight of the late 19th and early 20th century steel industry tycoons made the U.S. the biggest manufacturer of steel in the world, a global force and the backbone of the world economy. So why didn’t these fertile brains have the foresight to wonder whether their fish-filled sporting lake that they and their families enjoyed so much would stand up to heavy rain? It was an old earthen dam, after all … a big leaky dirt bowl overfilled with tons of water. Their cavalier disregard for the well-being of the folks who lived downstream and their failure to make any amends or suffer punishment is the the emotional force motivating the book’s characters and pulling the readers into the story, indeed gluing them to it.
Kudos to Ms. Coopey for picking the great flood as the catalyst for her story. Her characters work to achieve a state of “waterproof,” the healing we all seek under life’s eternally challenging and sometimes mind-boggling circumstances.
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Pattie P
5.0 out of 5 stars Great Historical Fiction
Reviewed in the United States on October 13, 2015
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If you like fiction based on historical facts, you will find this book to be of great interest. The historical Great Flood of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, which occurred toward the end of the 19th Century, is the basis for the story. The characters are fictitious, but I would imagine that a lot of the feelings portrayed by the characters would be similar to those that actually lived through the flood. The story is told through the eyes of a woman who was in her late teens when the North Fork Dam broke and caused the water to go to the lowest possible area, which was the City of Johnstown. So many died as a result of the storm, so many fell into dark depression, so many found new twists and turns in their lives, and so many found relationships which, prior to the flood, would never have been imaginable. There is a lot of history, a lot of friendships, and a bit of romance. This book will leave you wondering how the City of Johnstown (where I happen to live) could ever have managed to survive and about the strength of the people who lived there then and live here now..
Celine –
It’s probably always a little unfair to compare a new book to a previous one from the same author. But on the other hand, a good book sets expectations for the next one.
First, I have no doubt that the subject of the Johnstown tragedy and life afterwards was thoroughly researched. It shows, and it’s definitely a plus.
The characters are believable. The story’s not as exciting as I believed it would be from the outline but OK.
My major problem with the book was its structure. I had no trouble switching from present to past (the tenses used are different), but what I found utterly not believable is how Pam would 1)go about her current life as an old lady,2) remember her past, which we are then immersed into, then 3) snapping back to the present, then 4) next time Pam starts reminiscing, somehow the trigger, or the cue, leads her to go back exactly where she let the story the last time and to continue from there.
Maybe it’s a detail, but it really bothered me and it was kind of a deal breaker, as I could plain not believe in the story.
For me that way of narrating was just very artificial. Who thinks back about something and a few days later think about what happened just after whatever you were remembering?
I think maybe the story would have worked better for me if the past and present were just told in parallel, without trying to create links from one to the other in chronological order. We just don’t reminisce chronologically.