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A review by tachyondecay
And Then She Fell by Alicia Elliott
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
Damn, I don’t think I can write a review that’s going to do this book justice. It’s not just because I’m a white woman, and I’m going to miss a thousand little elements that Alicia Elliott has put in her for her fellow Indigenous readers. It’s not just because I read this weeks ago and am behind on writing reviews, so my memory has faded a bit. No, it’s mostly because And Then She Fell is just one of those novels, the ones where I feel like I, as a reader, have let it down. I’m awestruck by it, and I’m not sure I have the words. This is a must-read (with the caveat that it is very heavy and triggering, of course, especially for racialized readers), and it’s a sign, following on from her essay collection, that Elliott deserves a spot in the new canon of CanLit (with the caveat that I am not sure such a canon, with all of its nationalist undertones, is a desirable or useful thing any more).
Alice is a Haudenosaunee woman from Six Nations who has just had a baby, Dawn, and is nominally working on a novel that retells the Haudenosaunee creation story. Her husband, Steve, is tenure track at a university in Toronto. He and Alice have just moved into a beautiful house in a neighbourhood where no one looks like Alice. As she endures microaggressions and postpartum depression, Alice looks back on a series of strange incidents in her life. Was she just hearing voices? Was she hearing her ancestors or spirits? Is she paranoid, or is her next-door neighbour out to get her and have Children’s Aid Society take away her kid? At times a thriller, at times a deeply personal story of mental illness and trauma, And Then She Fell is always, always a story about how our choices in responding to the world shape us.
Elliott does interesting things with perspective. The prologue is told from a limited third-person point of view, carrying us through Alice’s early life on the reserve, her narrow avoidance of an encounter with a fuckboy named Mason, thanks to the strange incident where Pocahontas (from the Disney Pocahontas) speaks directly to her from the television. Then the novel shifts to first person. As Alice’s mental illness worsens, her narration becomes increasingly unreliable: did she really run into Mason? Did Steve really say those things, did he mean it the way Alice interprets it? There are enough jagged breaks in the narrative that Elliott has us questioning every event, every detail, wondering what is “real” and what isn’t. Then again, this book might very well be saying that “reality” is an overrated concept.
Women are, of course, less readily taken seriously than men in our society. This goes double for Indigenous women. And Then She Fell is a story about women, about Indigenous women, and the bonds between them. All the major characters in this story are women, from Alice herself to her aunties and cousins, daughter, descendant. The men, even Steve, are secondary. They exist on the periphery of these events and are not a part of the fabric of meaning-making of them. Similarly, Elliott draws a boundary between Alice’s femme relations and the white women she often finds herself surrounded by.
Elliott pulls no punches in describing the relentless thrum of racism running through Alice’s days. Less big events and more microaggressions, Alice details what it feels like to move through her neighbourhood as a visibly Indigenous woman. The judgment, the double standards, especially around how she looks, what she buys at a liquor store, how she parents her children. Elliott lays bare the myriad ways that Canada, despite its pledges of reconciliation, continues to police Indigenous women. Probably one of the most visceral experiences reading this book as a white woman is feeling how Alice has to have her shields up 24/7, especially now that she lives off reserve. There’s no escape.
One of the questions beating within the heart of this story is, to what extent does intergenerational trauma influence one’s mental health and stability? Mental illness affects people of all races, ethnicities, and backgrounds. Yet not everyone has the same family history of enduring centuries of colonialism. When your people have undergone gaslighting on a generational scale, that’s a whole different type of trauma. How much of Alice’s unravelling is genetic, environmental, intergenerational? Can we even parse it out in that way, and if we can, should we?
As Alice’s postpartum depression deepens and her and Steve start to drift further apart, I found myself wishing things would work out between them. I wanted this book to have a happy ending. I wanted there to be some kind of revelation at the climax that would help Alice turn it all around. While I won’t spoil the ending for you, I feel safe warning you that Elliott doesn’t let us off that easy. Which is for the best. This book has teeth, teeth which it has no problem sinking into you, dear reader, and which will not let you go.
To say that the final act of And Then She Fell has a twist is an understatement. The twist transcends genre. I think many people will compare it to something like Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse for how Elliott describes things, which is apt. Nevertheless I was more reminded of Jo Walton’s My Real Children. In this final act, Elliott hammers home the theme lurking beneath this entire story: life isn’t about working towards some indefinite “happy” ending; life is everything we get, the good and the bad, and there is no way to pull it apart and optimize for the good.
In a way it reminds me of that famous speech at the end of “Vincent and the Doctor,” where the Doctor tells Amy that life is a series of good things and bad things, and you hope that the good outweighs the bad. Except Elliott takes this one step further, admonishes us that sometimes the good doesn’t outweigh the bad. Sometimes a life sucks, but it is and was, and if we could go back and change that, it wouldn’t be our life anymore. This might feel fatalist, but I think it might be more appropriate to call it circular. In the end, Alice’s story (by which I mean her life) overlaps with the creation story she is trying to work up the nerve to tell.
I really … I really appreciate this message. Again, that might feel weird given how addicted our culture is to the idea that “everything [should be] awesome.” This theme grounds me. I’m entering my mid-thirties, and I’m really starting to coming to terms with the fact that I am an adult and this is my life. I look back and wonder what I might have done differently, and I look forward and wonder what I might try to do in the future. And it’s so tempting to try to optimize my happiness. So I need art that grabs me by the collar and pulls me back and says, “No, Kara. You can’t do that.” Not shouldn’t. Can’t. Can’t be done.
This is the brilliance of Alicia Elliott’s first novel: the layers. It’s about mental illness, about racism, about connection and isolation. It’s about choices and what we leave for our descendants. It’s about who we are in relation to our wider society, and the responsibilities we have for telling stories with accuracy and grace. It’s about all of these things, speaks on all of these levels, and more spectacularly, it never stumbles, not once.
I never thought I would write this sentence, but my favourite part of this book was the cockroaches.
Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.
Alice is a Haudenosaunee woman from Six Nations who has just had a baby, Dawn, and is nominally working on a novel that retells the Haudenosaunee creation story. Her husband, Steve, is tenure track at a university in Toronto. He and Alice have just moved into a beautiful house in a neighbourhood where no one looks like Alice. As she endures microaggressions and postpartum depression, Alice looks back on a series of strange incidents in her life. Was she just hearing voices? Was she hearing her ancestors or spirits? Is she paranoid, or is her next-door neighbour out to get her and have Children’s Aid Society take away her kid? At times a thriller, at times a deeply personal story of mental illness and trauma, And Then She Fell is always, always a story about how our choices in responding to the world shape us.
Elliott does interesting things with perspective. The prologue is told from a limited third-person point of view, carrying us through Alice’s early life on the reserve, her narrow avoidance of an encounter with a fuckboy named Mason, thanks to the strange incident where Pocahontas (from the Disney Pocahontas) speaks directly to her from the television. Then the novel shifts to first person. As Alice’s mental illness worsens, her narration becomes increasingly unreliable: did she really run into Mason? Did Steve really say those things, did he mean it the way Alice interprets it? There are enough jagged breaks in the narrative that Elliott has us questioning every event, every detail, wondering what is “real” and what isn’t. Then again, this book might very well be saying that “reality” is an overrated concept.
Women are, of course, less readily taken seriously than men in our society. This goes double for Indigenous women. And Then She Fell is a story about women, about Indigenous women, and the bonds between them. All the major characters in this story are women, from Alice herself to her aunties and cousins, daughter, descendant. The men, even Steve, are secondary. They exist on the periphery of these events and are not a part of the fabric of meaning-making of them. Similarly, Elliott draws a boundary between Alice’s femme relations and the white women she often finds herself surrounded by.
Elliott pulls no punches in describing the relentless thrum of racism running through Alice’s days. Less big events and more microaggressions, Alice details what it feels like to move through her neighbourhood as a visibly Indigenous woman. The judgment, the double standards, especially around how she looks, what she buys at a liquor store, how she parents her children. Elliott lays bare the myriad ways that Canada, despite its pledges of reconciliation, continues to police Indigenous women. Probably one of the most visceral experiences reading this book as a white woman is feeling how Alice has to have her shields up 24/7, especially now that she lives off reserve. There’s no escape.
One of the questions beating within the heart of this story is, to what extent does intergenerational trauma influence one’s mental health and stability? Mental illness affects people of all races, ethnicities, and backgrounds. Yet not everyone has the same family history of enduring centuries of colonialism. When your people have undergone gaslighting on a generational scale, that’s a whole different type of trauma. How much of Alice’s unravelling is genetic, environmental, intergenerational? Can we even parse it out in that way, and if we can, should we?
As Alice’s postpartum depression deepens and her and Steve start to drift further apart, I found myself wishing things would work out between them. I wanted this book to have a happy ending. I wanted there to be some kind of revelation at the climax that would help Alice turn it all around. While I won’t spoil the ending for you, I feel safe warning you that Elliott doesn’t let us off that easy. Which is for the best. This book has teeth, teeth which it has no problem sinking into you, dear reader, and which will not let you go.
To say that the final act of And Then She Fell has a twist is an understatement. The twist transcends genre. I think many people will compare it to something like Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse for how Elliott describes things, which is apt. Nevertheless I was more reminded of Jo Walton’s My Real Children. In this final act, Elliott hammers home the theme lurking beneath this entire story: life isn’t about working towards some indefinite “happy” ending; life is everything we get, the good and the bad, and there is no way to pull it apart and optimize for the good.
In a way it reminds me of that famous speech at the end of “Vincent and the Doctor,” where the Doctor tells Amy that life is a series of good things and bad things, and you hope that the good outweighs the bad. Except Elliott takes this one step further, admonishes us that sometimes the good doesn’t outweigh the bad. Sometimes a life sucks, but it is and was, and if we could go back and change that, it wouldn’t be our life anymore. This might feel fatalist, but I think it might be more appropriate to call it circular. In the end, Alice’s story (by which I mean her life) overlaps with the creation story she is trying to work up the nerve to tell.
I really … I really appreciate this message. Again, that might feel weird given how addicted our culture is to the idea that “everything [should be] awesome.” This theme grounds me. I’m entering my mid-thirties, and I’m really starting to coming to terms with the fact that I am an adult and this is my life. I look back and wonder what I might have done differently, and I look forward and wonder what I might try to do in the future. And it’s so tempting to try to optimize my happiness. So I need art that grabs me by the collar and pulls me back and says, “No, Kara. You can’t do that.” Not shouldn’t. Can’t. Can’t be done.
This is the brilliance of Alicia Elliott’s first novel: the layers. It’s about mental illness, about racism, about connection and isolation. It’s about choices and what we leave for our descendants. It’s about who we are in relation to our wider society, and the responsibilities we have for telling stories with accuracy and grace. It’s about all of these things, speaks on all of these levels, and more spectacularly, it never stumbles, not once.
I never thought I would write this sentence, but my favourite part of this book was the cockroaches.
Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.