Fall on Your Knees [Paperback]

Ann-Marie MacDonald (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 3, 1997

A story of four sisters tied by inescapable family bonds, of miracles, terrible secrets, attempted murder and an extraordinary love affair. The settings range from haunted Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, through the battlefields of World War I, to the emerging jazz scene of New York City.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A sprawling saga about five generations of a family from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Fall on Your Knees is the impressive first fiction from Canadian playwright and actor Ann-Marie MacDonald. This epic tale of family history, family secrets, and music centers on four sisters and their relationships with each other and with their father. Set in the coal-mining communities of Nova Scotia in the early part of this century, the story also shifts to the battlefields of World War I and the jazz scene of New York City in the 1920s. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

From Booklist

A family pays the wages of lust in this memorable first novel, for it is most often lust that leads to unsuitable if not unholy couplings in the Piper family of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, in the early part of this century. Eighteen-year-old piano tuner James Piper is so smitten with 12-year-old Materia Mahmoud that he entices her from her traditional Lebanese family to marry him. Before she's 14 the untutored Materia gives birth to Kathleen, the beautiful and gifted child whom she is unable to love but whom James takes to his heart. There are more daughters: Mercedes, the good girl who becomes the little mother; Other Lily, who dies unbaptized when one day old; Frances, the bad girl who becomes a bawdy entertainer and worse; and Kathleen's daughter, Lily, the saintly crippled girl who will learn the secrets and find resolution and redemption. Actress-playwright MacDonald is a talented storyteller with a crisp yet lilting prose style that captures equally well the atmospheres of World War I trenches and Harlem jazz clubs. Michele Leber --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 566 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (July 3, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0099740516
• ISBN-13: 978-0099740513
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1.4 x 7.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (603 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,548,478 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

110 of 114 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Bizarre Page Turner, February 23, 2002

By 

Sandra Mitchell "Sandra Mitchell" (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Fall On Your Knees (Oprah's Book Club) (Paperback)

The only way that I can describe Fall on Your Knees is to compare it to a car accident. You don't want to look, but you can't stop yourself. The story of the Piper family is one of sadness, perversion, and well kept secrets. The writing is excellent, though the reader may find themselves confused at times. Some things are written like riddles, that leave you wondering if what you read means what you think it means. Keep reading..as the story unfolds, answers are revealed and things clarified. This is definitely a dark book, so prepare yourself, but it also is a page turner. This book is hard to put down, because you will want to know where is it going, why? What does this all mean? After completing it, I'm still trying to figure out if I liked it? But there is no question, the writing is supreme and the characters are still with me. That's good writing.

74 of 79 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Oprah has made a good choice, January 24, 2002

By 

Perry (Champaign, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fall On Your Knees (Oprah's Book Club) (Paperback)

This book, recommended to me by one of my college students, is one of those novels you can simply dive into and lose yourself in. Although I also read, and enjoy, punchy, sardonic, razor-edge writing like "The Corrections" (Franzen) and "White Noise" (DeLillo), this book is far from those styles. It's an old-fashioned "good read," focusing deeply on each character and twisting them around one another in endless ways.
There is obsession here, the darkest kind, and yet the book is also, in places, heartbreaking in its compassion for the characters. The most interesting of the four sisters, to me, was Frances. Mostly because her spinning out of control was unlike any I've read before. Her longing and misery, and her many idiosyncrasies, make her an unforgettable character.

The story of the parents in this story is so dismal in spots, that it brought to mind "Angela's Ashes," though the plot is nothing close.
I think that what makes this book stand apart from other good reads is the feeling that the author truly came to love her characters. And the story is so multi-faceted and surprising that it fully earns its 500-plus pages.
Great book. I haven't read many of "Oprah's" book club choices, but I applaud her on this choice.

45 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A very impressive (if somewhat overrated) literary debut, April 24, 2002

By 

Ken J W Baker - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fall On Your Knees (Oprah's Book Club) (Paperback)

Fall On Your Knees is a most impressive first novel from Anne-Marie MacDonald, previously best known (at least here in Canada) as an actress and playwright (nowadays she's probably best known as the host of Life and Times, a kind of Canadian version of A&E's Biography series). Being a first novel, it has many of the same strengths and weaknesses common to a lot of maiden literary efforts.

Ultimately, of all the novels that I've read, the one this most resembles is Steinbeck's East of Eden. A lot of the action in both novels takes place in the same approximate historical era, both make extensive use of biblical imagery and themes, both are (in different ways) about how the sins of a father are visited on his offspring, and how family secrets and lies eventually reverberate through generations like bullets that shatter upon entering the human body and end up wreaking fearful damage in many nooks and crannies. Both novels also in the end suffer somewhat from the fact that they're obviously straining to be Great Books that will also connect with a popular audience.

On the plus side, Fall On Your Knees practically throbs on every page with its author's obvious love of language and sheer joy in the storytelling process itself. The story shifts continually back and forth in time and place as it relates the sprawling, multi-generational saga of the Piper and (to a much lesser extent) Mahmoud families of Cape Breton. Unlike so much modern fiction, with it's airless prose, and cramped, crabbed preoccupations (the product, I believe, of too much time spent in creative writing seminars and not enough time spent actually out and about in the world), Fall On Your Knees is a big book about Big Things. Moreover, in focusing mainly on the Piper daughters, Kathleen, Mercedes, (especially) Frances, and Lily, Ms. MacDonald demonstrates demonstrates an exceptional ability to sketch vivid, complex, and ultimately heartbreaking female characters, and her ear for the speech patterns of young girls is positively uncanny.

Nonetheless, I also think that the novel has some significant weaknesses that prevent it from becoming the masterpiece it's more overly enthusiastic partisans claim it to be. In some respects, its weaknesses are of a piece with its strengths. Earlier, I mentioned the author's obvious love of language. Many passages in this book are as beautifully written and moving as anything I've ever read(You will literally laugh AND cry). Unfortunately, there are many others that are simply OVERWRITTEN, and this ultimately dilutes some of the story's obvious power. The same can be said for the novel's structure, which not only weaves back and forth in time as already mentioned, but also tells multiple versions of the same events from multiple points of view. Some have compared this technique to peeling away the layers of an onion, but I think a more accurate analogy would be to a striptease. Like a striptease, the "climax" is really an anti-climax, since too much has been revealed at too great a length already. Any reasonably astute reader will have long since figured out what "really" happened long before everything is explained once and for all. Instead of drawing you deeper into the story, the red herrings that MacDonald continues to pile up just become annoying after awhile and by what I'm sure is meant to be a shattering climax, I for one could only say to myself, "What took you so long?" However, it must be said that there is ONE genuine surprise towards the end, that while it seems to come completely out of left field, makes a certain amount of sense once you think about it for more than a moment.

Still, overall, Fall On Your Knees is not only worth reading, it makes you eagerly anticipate Ms. MacDonald's follow-up efforts (hopefully there will be many more). Even its failures are the result of too much ambition, rather than a lack of talent. It's almost always better to reach for the stars and fall just short, than not to reach at all.