Critical Reviews of Fall on Your Knees

Ann-Marie MacDonald's novel Fall on Your Knees pays homage to the tradition of girls' stories that teaches young females how to accommodate happily to the world around them.2 MacDonald is no stranger to revising literary traditions. In her award-winning play, Good Night Desdemona, (Good Morning Juliet), MacDonald rewrites two of Shakespeare's most famous heroines, allowing them greater power and substance. Similarly, in the process of creating the four Piper girls who read and imitate girls' stories, MacDonald's novel shows how the girls inevitably revise the cultural scripts which they inherit. The Piper girls necessarily comprehend and articulate their own circumstances through the models of girlhood available to them, particularly Louisa May Alcott's An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870) and Little Women, and L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables. Inevitably, as the girls attempt to emulate the model, they remodel it. MacDonald's narrator highlights how the retelling of the story necessarily alters it by pointing out that "Every time Frances tells the true story, the story gets a little truer" (249). As critics such as Jennifer Andrews and Hilary Buri have noted, Fall On Your Knees opens up a world of abuse, oppression, and despair. In doing so, it locates new scripts for articulating that which has been typically elided in girls' stories: abuse, incest, and racism. MacDonald's latest novel, The Way the Crow Flies (2003), also revisits and revises an ideology of traditional girlhood by depicting young girls as abusers and murderers. Unlike the cruel and almost hopeless world of The Way the Crow Flies, Fall on Your Knees may present a bleak world of intolerance as Sheldon Currie suggests (111), but, in diverging from the girls' story traditions that it acknowledges as sources, it also suggests a successful method for change-continually remodeling inherited traditions. Unlike the overt message of its predecessors, FaW On Your Knees does not encourage or allow the heroines to rest content with their lot; they must actively seek to change it.
http://elibrary.bigchalk.com/elibweb/curriculumca/do/document?set=literature&groupid=3&requestid=literature&resultid=1&urn=urn%3Aproquest%3AUS%3BCH%3Bpqllit_crit_lib%3Bcriticism%3B943411091%3B

“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. 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. Winner of the 1997 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book, it was a national bestseller in Canada for two years, and it has been translated into 17 languages.
http://www.randomhouse.ca/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780394281780

 actually got this book on accident from some shady book club that mysteriously sent me five books and then tried to charge me for them. I have the hardcover version, and the cover art looked... boring. I neglected this book for a year.
The old saying "never judge a book by its cover" has never been more concise.
This book is an absolute work of art. The incredible depth of each character is unparalleled by anything else I have read. While "Fall On Your Knees" does contain some very controversial subjects, such as child molestation, it does not present itself in a distasteful manner. I was reminded of "Bark of the Dogwood" with its similar themes and great writing. The frailty and emotions of humankind are exquisitely revealed here. Cape Breton Island is painted into your mind, you can see it perfectly, from rocky cliffs over the ocean to clapboard houses all in a row. MacDonald is a master storyteller. She manages to completely envelop you in the lives of those whom she writes about, to the point that if you tell me I wasn't there to see all of this happen, I would have to catch myself before I told you that you were mistaken. Absolutely enthralling. Don't be like me and ignore this masterpiece. Buy a copy for yourself and every other person you know. It's that good.
http://www.amazon.ca/Fall-Your-Knees-Ann-Marie-Macdonald/dp/0394281780