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The film The Sweet Hereafter is based on the novel of the same name written by Russell Banks. If you enjoyed the film, I encourage you to seek out the book, because it's wonderful. If you want to be a writer, or if you simply enjoy a good story, the novel has a great deal to offer you.
The book's central event is a school bus crash that kills many children in the small town of Sam Dent in upstate New York; the rest of the book explores the effect the tragedy has on the town and the novel's central characters.
The Sweet Hereafter provides the best example I've ever encountered of an author alternating between several first person narrators. It's told from four viewpoints: Dolores Driscoll, the bus driver; Billy Ansel, a grieving, alcoholic father of one of the dead children; Mitchell Stephens, a New York City lawyer who is trying to cope with grief over his own drug-addicted daughter; and Nichole Burnell, a teenager who was crippled in the accident.
Banks establishes such distinct cadences for each character that when all four of them are talking to one another, he goes sometimes for pages without a single "he said," "she said."
The book is 257 pages long and was first published in 1991, though parts of it appeared before that date in North American Review and Ontario Review.
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