Fall On Your Knees

Sarah Robertson is the trade, scholarly, and reference editor of the
Canadian Book Review Annual.

Set in the ethnically mixed coal-mining town of New Waterford, Nova
Scotia, this extraordinary saga of a Scottish-Lebanese family begins
with the elopement of James Piper, the piano tuner, and 13-year-old
Materia Mahmoud in 1898.

James quickly sours on marriage, but his ambitions are revived with the
arrival of his first daughter, Kathleen, a golden-voiced porcelain
beauty who grows up determined to become “the Eleonora Duse of the
operatic stage.” The undisclosed outcome of James’s devotion to his
first-born reverberates through the lives of the younger Piper
daughters: the pious, self-mortifying Mercedes; the self-destructive
rebel, Frances; and the wounded visionary, Lily. As the complex and
riveting narrative shifts backward and forward in time in its inexorable
march toward truth, the suspense—and the reader’s sense of
dread—escalates to an almost unbearable pitch.

Interspersed with the shocking plot twists are welcome gusts of mordant
humor. A car bearing a pair of bootleggers hurtles over a cliff after
the driver swerves to avoid “an oncoming carload of nuns.” The
beleaguered Mercedes, in a rare moment of contentment, muses, “[a]t
last ... we are a family. Daddy is senile, Frances is crazy, Lily is
lame and I’m unmarried. But we are a family.” In her pre-crazy days,
Frances uses a communion glove to service her customers at the local
speakeasy.

Historical detail—the Great War, Prohibition, pre–Cotton Club
Harlem, and especially the Cape Breton strikes of the 1920s—enriches
but never intrudes. And though MacDonald has fashioned an epic of
Victorian proportions, her characters are not stock types; they are
achingly real and multifaceted.

Fall On Your Knees is that rarest of birds—a first-rate literary page
turner.