MacDonald gives the most ordinary lives extraordinarily dramatic dimensions. It is a saga haunted by ghosts and saints, religious fanaticism, and magic. On the inexorable journey toward tragedy we encounter dark yet vivid images of neglect and violence, yet the novel radiates an unquenchable life-force, and yet the novel radiates an unquenchable life-force, shimmering with emotional depth, sensual with virtuoso descriptions of the power of music.
The book’s epigraph, taken from Wuthering Heights, seems appropriate to a novel concerned with the different, often violent, forms that love can take. As the details of the labyrinthine plot are pulled together, the question of whether it is possible to escape one’s family history gradually raises itself. The structure of the narrative is multi-faceted, richly layered, and shifts back and forth through time as it approaches the story from different angles, “giving it a mythic quality that allows dark, half buried secrets to be gracefully and chillingly revealed” ( The New York Times Book Review). Moving from Cape Breton Island to the battlefields of World War I, to Harlem in New York’s Jazz Age and the Depression, the tense and enthralling plot of Fall on Your Knees contains love, pain, death, joy, and triumph.
And then there is James, their flawed father. Their development as characters - beautiful Kathleen, the promising diva saintly Mercedes Frances, the mischievous bad girl, who tries to bear the family’s burden and disabled Lily, everyone’s favourite - forms the heart of the novel. At the center of this epic story is the nature of family love, beginning with the Piper sister who depend on one another for survival. And so, from early on, Ann-Marie MacDonald establishes some major themes: racial tension, isolation, passion and forbidden love, which will gradually lead to incest, death in childbirth, and even murder.
Winner of the 1997 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book, it was a national best seller in Canada for two years, and it has been translated into 17 languages.Īt the start of the 20th century, James Piper sets fire to his dead mother’s piano and heads out across Cape Breton Island to find a new place to live, eventually eloping with 13-year-old Materia Mahmoud, the daughter of wealthy, traditional Lebanese parents. Set largely in a Cape Breton coal mining community called New Waterford, ranging through four generations, Ann-Marie MacDonald’s dark, insightful, and hilarious first novel focuses on the Piper sisters and their troubled relationship with their father, James. “What a wild ride - I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough,” Oprah Winfrey told her viewers as she announced Fall on Your Knees as her February 2002 Book Club selection.
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