"Fall on Your Knees" by Ann-Marie Macdonald

Wow. This is a tome of a book, but so good! I didn't even really know what it was about until the end. This story is largely unpredictable, which I think is why I personally enjoyed it so much. Set mostly in a small mining town on Cape Breton Island, this story crosses 4 generations and many more decades, following the story of the Piper sisters and their father.

From Amazon.ca:

At the start of the 20th century, James Piper sets fire to his dead mother’s piano and heads out across Cape Breton Island to find a new place to live, eventually eloping with 13-year-old Materia Mahmoud, the daughter of wealthy, traditional Lebanese parents. And so, from early on, Ann-Marie MacDonald establishes some major themes: racial tension, isolation, passion and forbidden love, which will gradually lead to incest, death in childbirth, and even murder. At the centre of this epic story is the nature of family love, beginning with the Piper sister who depend on one another for survival. Their development as characters — beautiful Kathleen, the promising diva; saintly Mercedes; Frances, the mischievous bad girl, who tries to bear the family’s burden; and disabled Lily, everyone’s favourite — forms the heart of the novel. And then there is James, their flawed father.

Moving from Cape Breton Island to the battlefields of World War I, to Harlem in New York’s Jazz Age and the Depression, the tense and enthralling plot of Fall on Your Knees contains love, pain, death, joy, and triumph. As the details of the labyrinthine plot are pulled together, the question of whether it is possible to escape one’s family history gradually raises itself. 


I highly recommend!