Trailer Park Tuesday: Cascade by Maryanne O'Hara

Welcome to Trailer Park Tuesday, a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies. Unless their last name is Grisham or King, authors will probably never see their trailers on the big screen at the local cineplex. And that's a shame because a lot of hard work goes into producing these short marriages between book and video. So, if you like what you see, please spread the word and help these videos go viral.

The cover design for Maryanne O'Hara's debut novel Cascade was what first drew me to the book (more on that in a later Judging a Book post here at the blog), the plot's premise (romance, racism, and community theater set in a Massachusetts town about to be flooded by a reservoir) really set the hook, but the trailer ultimately convinced me I need to read this book sooner rather than later.  The trailer shifts moods several times over the course of its two-and-a-half minutes, but I like the sense of unease with which the video begins.  A ticking clock, the rush of a river's current and the fact that Desdemona Spaulding is figuratively drowning in Cascade, a summer resort town during the Great Depression, and is "caught between duty and desire"--this all gives the trailer a sense of urgency.  There is a lot at stake here and the potential for great tragedy.  O'Hara herself appears in the trailer, explaining how she got the inspiration for her fictional town of Cascade from an actual community which was drowned in the name of progress during the 1930s.  She points to a historical placard overlooking Quabbin Reservoir and says, "I was stuck by the image of this town that had existed--houses, a post office, farms, cars.  I could never really get the setting out of my mind--the fact that you could just take a town and dismantle it and say it no longer existed."  If the book trailer is any indication, it will be hard to shake O'Hara's novel as well.