‘Daisy Children’ form a chain to disaster
The idea for Sofia Grant’s latest historical novel, “The Daisy Children” (HarperCollins, $15.99, 407 pages), was born a few years ago, when the Oakland author came across a nonfiction book on a long-forgotten tragedy — the New London school explosion of March 18, 1937, in rural Texas.
It was a massive blast. A pocket of accumulated natural gas erupted into a huge fireball, apparently sparked when a teacher turned on a power tool. It reduced an entire wing of the steel-and-concrete building to rubble, instantly killing 295 children and teachers with at least a dozen more succumbing later to their injuries, raising the death toll to 311.
It made international news at the time — even covered by a young Walter Cronkite — and the tragic toll remains on record as the deadliest school disaster in American history. Yet it has faded into the past.
When Grant read of the explosion, she was deeply moved and amazed she’d never heard of such a significant event. Pondering the level of grief families must have experienced, the prolific author of “The Dress in the Window” and more than a dozen young adult novels began to imagine what might have happened in New London after the initial shock had passed and how life — what was left of it — went on.
“What was significant to me was that an entire generation of children in this town had vanished,” Grant said, sitting on a bench in a park near her home. “I wondered what that would do to a community — how families could find hope after such tragedy and how all this affected the children who survived.”
To find real-life answers, Grant visited the East Texas town of New London, the original school site, the cemetery. She did much of her research in the town’s small museum, dedicated to honoring those lost in the disaster. She pored over photos, letters and news clippings and talked to those descended from the original families involved. “You could tell that these folks all grew up together,” she said. “It was a very localized tragedy.”
She discovered accounts of families whose children had survived the blast and and other families who were out of their minds with grief, one man even making wild threats to kill the remaining children. She read about those who decided to have more children, and she began to consider how these events might affect generations down the line.
So she came up with a fictional follow-up about a group of kids, the so-called Daisy children — the “replacement” babies born about a year after the disaster to parents who had lost children in the blast.
Her book takes readers through four generations of women, moving back and forth from the 1930s to the present-day story of Katie Garrett, a young Boston exec going through career and marriage crises. Katie is the granddaughter of Margaret Pierson, one of the Daisy children.
Because of strained family relationships in her own life, Katie has only met her grandmother once and knows little of the story of the explosion. But when her grandmother dies, Katie learns she’s been left a modest inheritance and travels to New London for the reading of the will.
There she meets her distant cousin and co-beneficiary, Scarlett, a young woman as colorful and flamboyant as her name, who welcomes Katie with open arms. Together they sift through their grandmother’s possessions and discover long-buried family secrets.
Grant writes with rich details and references — from smartphones, Ubers and Amazon fulfillment centers in modern times back to the days of Brylcreem and Lavoris. Sometimes, the time jumps are a little confusing, and it takes a minute to adjust to the era at hand. But once you’re in, it’s easy to immerse oneself in the period.
There’s a clear motherdaughter relationship theme, cascading down the generations — something close to Grant’s heart. “My own mother has been gone for 20 years, and my daughter is 23,” she said. “So, when I started writing about this, it brought to mind my own experiences. Motherdaughter stuff comes up a lot in my writing, no matter the genre.”