It’s not often that you have one voice actor doing the narration and all the different character voices and they really nail it. If you’ve listened to the other audiobook, I’d love to hear what the whole thing was like!) Cassandra Campbell does really an INCREDIBLE job with the audiobook adaptation. (There’s also another audiobook version with Nikki James, but I decided I preferred Campbell after listening to excerpts of both readers. The audiobook is performed by Cassandra Campbell. And what better way to revisit a book than to encounter it in a different form: audiobook. Having read the book years and years before starting this blog, I had had it on my to-reread-TBR for a while, since I felt that I needed to re-read it before reviewing it on Casey the Canadian Lesbrarian, which I felt was necessary because it’s such a big book not only for queer Can Lit specifically but Can Lit in general and perceptions of Can Lit outside Canada (thanks, I guess, to Oprah for that?). I think I probably just thought it was very good “literature” (imagine that with a posh British accent) as my English honours undergrad degree had taught me to assess. At any case, I read it and honestly I can’t really remember now much of anything about that reading experience. I probably was also more steeled against reading books with disturbing content by that time.

I think when I finally read it through the first time I already knew that there were queer characters or a queer plotline of some kind, which is maybe what allowed me to persevere. I know I didn’t make it very far into the book, because it gave me an icky and creepy feeling right from the beginning it turns out this feeling was entirely warranted, so good job teen me on the close reading skills.

I have a distinct memory of getting a hold of a copy sometime when I was in high school and sitting down on this grassy area facing the ocean behind the grocery store in the small town I grew up in (it was a really nice stretch of impossibly green and perfect looking grass that my friends and I used to call “the movie grass”). Actually, that’s not the first time I encountered the book. Honestly where should I start with this devastating masterpiece, Fall On Your Kneesby Ann-Marie MacDonald, originally published in 1996? I recently read this book - or rather listened to the audiobook - for the second time after first reading it in my early twenties.

Fall on your knees author