Product Description

The Piper family is steeped in secrets, lies, and unspoken truths. At the eye of the storm is one secret that threatens to shake their lives -- even destroy them.

Set on stormy Cape Breton Island off Nova Scotia, Fall on Your Knees is an internationally acclaimed multigenerational saga that chronicles the lives of four unforgettable sisters. Theirs is a world filled with driving ambition, inescapable family bonds, and forbidden love.

Compellingly written, by turns menacingly dark and hilariously funny, this is an epic tale of five generations of sin, guilt, and redemption.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17679 in Books
• Published on: 2002-01
• Released on: 2002-01-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780743237185
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

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.

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

From Kirkus Reviews
From award-winning Canadian actress and playwright MacDonald comes a full-bodied, ever-rolling debut, the story of a talented Cape Breton family with more than its share of repression and tragedy. As the 19th century ends, young James Piper travels from the Breton hinterland to the civilized port of Sydney seeking his fortune, and in no time at all he acquires a child bride, a house built by his Lebanese father-in-law, and the everlasting enmity of his wife's powerful family. Although the ardor between James and his spouse soon cools, they now have a daughter, Kathleen, who seems destined for great things when her breathtaking voice and beauty begin to captivate all as she enters her teens. But another shadow falls on the family when James finds himself making improper advances to her. Appalled, he patches things up with his wife (two more daughters being the result), goes off to fight in WW I, and sends Kathleen to New York to study voice after he returns. All still isn't well, however, when she comes home pregnant six months later, then dies in childbirth when Mom slices her open to save her daughter's twins. One of them dies anyway, followed two days later by Mom, who commits suicide. James is left with three girls to raise, all of them scarred for life by the crisis: The newborn contracts polio when her aunt Frances, a child herself, tries to baptize her in a nearby creek; Frances is raped by James in his grief at losing Kathleen; the eldest, a witness to the rape, is also the one to find her mother's body. Such awful events, though quickly repressed, bode no good for the family, and ultimately tragedy overtakes them all. A plate piled dangerously high with calamities, perhaps, but the time, place, and people- -especially the children--all ring clear and true, making for an accomplished, considerably affecting saga. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

Bizarre Page Turner
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.

Oprah has made a good choice
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.

A very impressive (if somewhat overrated) literary debut
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.