Fall On Your Knees

Starred review from March 31, 1997
Not a single line is superfluous in this richly layered tale of the secrets within several generations of a Canadian family. Both feverishly intense and darkly humorous, the drama of the Piper family emerges amidst a backdrop of racial tension and social change in Canada during the first half of the 20th century. Piano tuner James Piper dotes on his beautiful and musically talented eldest daughter, Kathleen, almost to the exclusion of everyone else, including his Lebanese wife and his other daughters. After Kathleen's death during childbirth and his wife's suicide a few days later, James forbids any mention of Kathleen's name. But the bitter fruit of illicit passion will continue to take its toll on Kathleen's survivors. Though the mortality rate in this family sometimes challenges credibility, playwright and actress MacDonald's ambitious first novel displays a remarkable assurance of style, pacing and plotting as unexpected twists propel a complex story that builds inexorably to tragedy. MacDonald uses the surface tension and love between James and his daughters to explore the repercussions of repression, sin, guilt and violence that simmer beneath the family's delicately maintained equilibrium. Her gifts for character development, comic dialogue and vivid evocation of social milieu and specific background detail-from Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, to New York City in the 1920s-add texture to an entrancing narrative. Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club alternate selections; author tour. (Apr.) FYI: MacDonald began this book as a play but finished it five years later as her first work of fiction. Fall on Your Knees was previously published in Canada, where it rose to the top of the bestseller lists.

Ann-Marie MacDonald's family saga, set on Nova Scotia's Cape Breton Island and published in 1996, is enjoying a deserved renaissance since being stamped with the Oprah symbol. It's an unforgettable novel that deserves more than one reading, and this recording is an enjoyable way to revisit it. But the abridgment, while fine as these things go, cuts out so much of the novel's intricacy that it won't do for a reader's first foray into MacDonald's world. Nikki James has to contend with sprinklings of Gaelic and Lebanese, but other than a few cloying voices (always children or men) and her inability to correctly pronounce blancmange, she's comfortable with the text. It's just too bad there isn't more of it. D.B. (c) AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine