-Book TALK Critique for the newspaper!
Journals & Critique(Review) DUE DECEMBER 12TH
Book Talk Novel Critique
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BOOK TALK HELP......
1. Go back to English 12 page & find the drop page "WORLD NEWSPAPERS" for links. Are you looking for places to find interview clips with your author? First look at Writers and Company's 20 year archive of podcasts. Listen to the entire interview- it will really help in your understanding. Radio: Writers and Company (Podcasts from the last 20 years!) www.cbc.ca/radio/writersandcompany The Next Chapter (CBC) with Shelagh Rogers www.cbc.ca/radio/thenextchapter National Public Radio www.npr.org/ BBC (Books) http://www.bbc.com/culture/tags/books For scholarly research: JSTOR (you can have 5 free downloads of essays per month) about.jstor.org/ Print media: http://www.bbc.com/culture/tags/books BCwww.npr.org/resources for your novel study: For the links to these newspapers and more - go back up to English 12 and find the drop page. The Guardian (Sunday Book Review) The New Yorker The Globe and Mail The Irish Times The Washington Post |
Macdonald’s First Prose is Breathtaking
Book review by: P. Dobie
Open your atlas and let your index finger gently sweep across the Canadian landscape east until you reach water and then go a little further across and up—you’ve arrived. Cape Breton at the northern tip of Nova Scotia in a town in its embryonic stage—New Waterford at the turn of the century. One wonders whether Ann-Marie MacDonald’s novel , Fall On Your Knees , could have been set elsewhere, but the answer floods back with a firm, no. In this story, it doesn’t feel like the character inhabit the town, but that the towns growth is innately organic and its DNA is the cast of characters themselves. Yet, with the creation of a life or of lives, comes the possibly of growth off kilter and the bending sideways; it is these permutations that MacDonald explores with fervid interest.
If you plan to read this novel, set aside a good chunk of time, because after page fifty the daily acts of living, eating, texting, and working become irritating intrusions. MacDonald has created a world that couldn’t possibly exist, but it does despite itself and it does with provoking pin pricks and bold stabs. I cared about every single character in this book—both bad and good and each has lived on with me into the new year. The idea of flat or stock characters has no place in this story.
The author’s success as a playwright (Goodnight Desdemona—Good Morning Juliet) has given her an acute sense of reader’s engagement. As she commented in a Globe and Mail interview from two weeks ago that a theatre audience member leaving the theatre takes more than a simple distaste for what is happening on stage, but the reader closing the book happens in a split instant. I guiltily raise my hand in acknowledgment that I close books all the time when I feel fed up, or when I fell the veneer of realism slipping. That is why I am so amazed by MacDonald’s sense of drama; she make us sit in our seats by pure enchantment despite the sometimes harsh scenarios. When I did have to leave the book for the stuff of life, I wanted to race back. I wanted to know more-dig deeper, and unravel the secrets.
Fall On Your Knees explores a story of family, desire, aspirations, vanity, arrogance and human weakness. We begin at the end “They are all dead now” and we go on to find out who began this saga”-James Piper. He is introduced as a young man ready for the world, but as the story unfolds, so do his weaknesses. A pale, Anglo man marries into the dark mystery of a Lebanese girl. Her family has escaped the prejudice and weighty struggles of the ‘old country’ to welcome the new, but not all of the ‘new world’ ways are welcomed. This story explores people’s outward motivations about family, relationship, religion and war and she makes the characters turn inwards; MacDonald forces them to confront their own fragile belief systems.
The one belief she explores the most fervently is that of their belief in truth ad in memory: “When she gets tired she stops tasting the truth. In a moment of fatigue she wanted everything to be alright, but wishing never made anything right.” We meet Frances, our true and tragic protagonist, when she is a small girl imitating her mother’s language in the kitchen “Ya Helwi, Vaaa aa ‘yni, te ‘berini.” But this time innocence and belief is brief. The drama that unfold before her eyes one night will plague her and shape her approach to everything: others, object, and herself, she was left with the core memory and she spends most of the book trying to reconstruct memory; only it is lodged very deep within her and has become part of her very being. As we follow her struggle, we are drawn inexorably into the lives of others: Mercedes, Lily, Leo, James, even the cat, and finally Kathleen. A diary finally reveals Kathleen’s truth which reshapes the events of the entire book; it made me want to reread the story at once. MacDonald forces the reader to take a stand on forgiveness and redemption—and I am still enmeshed in it, trying to decide.
The pace of the novel is quick, but the story is also graced by MacDonald’s talent at bring the rooms, the barren land, and even the food into sharp focus:”…her plushy smell of fresh wet bread and oil, a pot of bezzella and roz with lamb on the stove, the lid buzzing sleepily. Outside, the winter drizzle blurs the window.” The visceral feeling evoked by her descriptions make the psychological exploration palpable.
Just as Materia’s dance of the ‘dabke’ suggest, “Then you lower your arms towards them, hands still weaving to the music, and you lure the person until they get up and join you because they can’t refuse. Then they become the center.” MacDonald draws every characters into the center of the dance in undulating waves and the reader is left without words—only rhythm and the crash of cymbals.
View Before Completing the Novel Response Journals:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoBXGJCNVPg (Youtube Video)
Book review by: P. Dobie
Open your atlas and let your index finger gently sweep across the Canadian landscape east until you reach water and then go a little further across and up—you’ve arrived. Cape Breton at the northern tip of Nova Scotia in a town in its embryonic stage—New Waterford at the turn of the century. One wonders whether Ann-Marie MacDonald’s novel , Fall On Your Knees , could have been set elsewhere, but the answer floods back with a firm, no. In this story, it doesn’t feel like the character inhabit the town, but that the towns growth is innately organic and its DNA is the cast of characters themselves. Yet, with the creation of a life or of lives, comes the possibly of growth off kilter and the bending sideways; it is these permutations that MacDonald explores with fervid interest.
If you plan to read this novel, set aside a good chunk of time, because after page fifty the daily acts of living, eating, texting, and working become irritating intrusions. MacDonald has created a world that couldn’t possibly exist, but it does despite itself and it does with provoking pin pricks and bold stabs. I cared about every single character in this book—both bad and good and each has lived on with me into the new year. The idea of flat or stock characters has no place in this story.
The author’s success as a playwright (Goodnight Desdemona—Good Morning Juliet) has given her an acute sense of reader’s engagement. As she commented in a Globe and Mail interview from two weeks ago that a theatre audience member leaving the theatre takes more than a simple distaste for what is happening on stage, but the reader closing the book happens in a split instant. I guiltily raise my hand in acknowledgment that I close books all the time when I feel fed up, or when I fell the veneer of realism slipping. That is why I am so amazed by MacDonald’s sense of drama; she make us sit in our seats by pure enchantment despite the sometimes harsh scenarios. When I did have to leave the book for the stuff of life, I wanted to race back. I wanted to know more-dig deeper, and unravel the secrets.
Fall On Your Knees explores a story of family, desire, aspirations, vanity, arrogance and human weakness. We begin at the end “They are all dead now” and we go on to find out who began this saga”-James Piper. He is introduced as a young man ready for the world, but as the story unfolds, so do his weaknesses. A pale, Anglo man marries into the dark mystery of a Lebanese girl. Her family has escaped the prejudice and weighty struggles of the ‘old country’ to welcome the new, but not all of the ‘new world’ ways are welcomed. This story explores people’s outward motivations about family, relationship, religion and war and she makes the characters turn inwards; MacDonald forces them to confront their own fragile belief systems.
The one belief she explores the most fervently is that of their belief in truth ad in memory: “When she gets tired she stops tasting the truth. In a moment of fatigue she wanted everything to be alright, but wishing never made anything right.” We meet Frances, our true and tragic protagonist, when she is a small girl imitating her mother’s language in the kitchen “Ya Helwi, Vaaa aa ‘yni, te ‘berini.” But this time innocence and belief is brief. The drama that unfold before her eyes one night will plague her and shape her approach to everything: others, object, and herself, she was left with the core memory and she spends most of the book trying to reconstruct memory; only it is lodged very deep within her and has become part of her very being. As we follow her struggle, we are drawn inexorably into the lives of others: Mercedes, Lily, Leo, James, even the cat, and finally Kathleen. A diary finally reveals Kathleen’s truth which reshapes the events of the entire book; it made me want to reread the story at once. MacDonald forces the reader to take a stand on forgiveness and redemption—and I am still enmeshed in it, trying to decide.
The pace of the novel is quick, but the story is also graced by MacDonald’s talent at bring the rooms, the barren land, and even the food into sharp focus:”…her plushy smell of fresh wet bread and oil, a pot of bezzella and roz with lamb on the stove, the lid buzzing sleepily. Outside, the winter drizzle blurs the window.” The visceral feeling evoked by her descriptions make the psychological exploration palpable.
Just as Materia’s dance of the ‘dabke’ suggest, “Then you lower your arms towards them, hands still weaving to the music, and you lure the person until they get up and join you because they can’t refuse. Then they become the center.” MacDonald draws every characters into the center of the dance in undulating waves and the reader is left without words—only rhythm and the crash of cymbals.
View Before Completing the Novel Response Journals:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoBXGJCNVPg (Youtube Video)