Playwright turned novelist Ann-Marie MacDonald works in the intertwined realms of adolescence and historical fiction. Her long complicated sprawling first novel Fall On Your Knees takes us across history to a wonderfully evoked Cape Breton Island. But unlike so many first novels, this work doesn’t concentrate on a single girl at one moment in her life. Overly ambitious, MacDonald gives us the story of generations and, in particular, one complicated family of sisters and a twisted father. At times, MacDonald’s prose can be beautiful, but her elaborate plot distracts us from what is best about this novel: the possible past which she evokes, and the almost mythical setting which MacDonald infuses with ghosts, spirits and the remains of the dead.
/ Ann-Marie MacDonald / Knopf Canada / $28.95