After the Falls picks up where Catherine Gildiner’s best-selling 1999 memoir, Too Close to the Falls, leaves off, chronicling the author’s teens in suburban Buffalo, where her family moved in 1960 to start fresh after her expulsion from Catholic school in Lewiston, NY. Readers of the first book will recall that in an attempt to keep Gildiner out of trouble, her pharmacist father put her to work at the age of four delivering prescriptions with Roy, an African-American with whom she shared both adventures and friendship. Gildiner’s mother, refusing to play the role of a stereotypical 1960s woman, never learned to cook or type, and urged her daughter to follow in her footsteps, lest she end up unwillingly doing both someday. Read more…