Review of Fall On Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald

My book club (the virtual one I run) reads a variety of books. Someone had suggested Fall On Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald because they had heard about it via Oprah's Book Club. I was extremely excited to read this book, because I love books with diverse backgrounds. The book did not disappoint. I'm so happy we read it. I'm even happier I got to discuss the book with friends. I would have given this book 5 stars if it weren't for the heavy plot. This is a brilliant novel. It's extremely well written. See my full review below:

Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fall on Your Knees is a heavy drama that explores friendship, racial tension, varying religious views, isolation, domestic abuse, and forbidden love in a brilliantly crafted complex plot that includes incest, death and murder.

The plot follows the Piper family; a father, James Piper, and four children, Kathleen, Frances, Lily and Mercedes, from before World War I, through the roaring 20s, and the great depression. The four sisters gradually grow from children into fully developed characters with different personalities and their own individual stories. Each sister's story is filled with intrigue and dark secrets which are gradually revealed. Their stories all weave together in an extremely unsettling way. Ann-Marie MacDonald combines rapid mixing of tenses and points-of-view using combinations of journal, memory, dialogue and narrative. This can sometimes lead to confusion, but it ultimately allows the offer to tell the story from multiple vantage points, gradually revealing more clues as the same scene takes place from a subsequent view-point. The depth of the characters draws you into their lives and the cleverly written and sublime metaphorical words put you straight in their heads.

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Reviewing Looking for Will by Jane Collins-Phillippe

I love a good thriller. I love simple and even complicated plots. I especially love well-developed characters. Sometimes though, plots can be overly complicated and understanding everything about a character and their family can be too much. I recently read Looking for Will by Jane Collins-Philippe and felt that it was a book with a great, albeit overly complicated, plot and overly developed (words I never thought I would say) characters. To me, this left me feeling like this book just missed the mark. It's a story with great potential, but to me it's a book that needs to be edited and polished before it will be something great. See my full review below.

Looking for Will by Jane Collins-Philippe
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book is a thriller set in and around Ontario about a family on their way home from vacation in Calgary when their little boy goes missing from the back seat of the vehicle. The plot, all too real, centers around the boy, Will, that was supposed to be asleep in the car and the two parents fighting so much that they didn't notice the little boy was missing until they were to their motel.

The plot, writing and pacing is great through and especially including Chapter 2. After that...

The book is told from a lot of different perspectives. Too many if you ask me. There is Davide and Jan Dewhurst, the parents of a boy who goes missing from the car, Sergeant Patricia Hayes, an old couple Gracie and Gabe Fortune living in the middle of nowhere and the weird guy with a dark secret, Matthew Pepperal. All of the voices/perspectives made for a really complex plot but at the cost of sometimes being confusing and losing the readers overall interest.

When it came to learning all about the Fortune family, which is significant to the overall plot, there was too much talking about the characters and not enough showing us about the characters. I'm not entirely sure I needed to know the back stories into each of the kids.

It is clear that the book, characters and plot are very well developed. I just don't feel the book itself is well polished and there were lots of areas where it could have been improved to make me, or any reader, like it more.

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**Disclaimer - I was provided a free copy of this book by Booktasters in exchange for an honest review.**

Reviewing "Happiness is All We Want" by Ashutosh Mishra

A few years ago I attended a seminar that constantly referenced a book The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt (a great read by the way). Haidt's book tried to get to the root of what makes people happy and touches on philosophy, psychology, economics, evolution, and cognitive science. What Haidt does is explain what makes people happy, but it's not a self-help book. It's a book that says that what we want and need is happiness. Since then I've read several self-help books about happiness. One of which, thanks to Booktasters Nonfiction, was Happiness is All We Want by Ashutosh Mishra. Find out what I thought about this book below.


Happiness Is All We Want by Ashutosh Mishra
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Happiness Is All We Want" is a practical approach to seeking happiness and improving your life. The book is written in a conversational tone and is divided into three sections: mind, body and soul. Each section discusses every day type problems/obstacles a person may face and how to overcome them to achieve happiness.

I found the book to be engaging, well articulated and not pedantic like some self-help books can be. I highly recommend this book.

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