And Then She Fell, by Alicia Elliott.

And Then She Fell by Alicia Elliott

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


You truly have to read this one right to the end. This book has elements of almost every genre or situation: time travel, magic, history, unforgivable bigotry, racial genocide, and political diatribes against the deliberate cultural destruction of an ancient way of life.



Thousands and thousands of children died. A way of life and a language almost became extinct. A magical belief system was legally declared a heresy and the indigenous peoples were forbidden by law to hold or practice their ceremonies – in public or private.



All of these many themes and more were woven into Alice’s horrifying story. I was terrified for baby Dawn. I kept having to remind myself: This is just A NOVEL. It is FICTION! Do NOT call the cops or CAS! (No spoilers, but those descriptions of blood splatters, etc., in the baby’s bedroom had my blood pressure soaring!)



Alicia Elliot writes so intelligently and convincingly. Alice (and yes, I did note the similarity between the author’s and main character’s names) is an indigenous Mohawk woman who married a white professor, moved away from her reservation and felt alienated and judged by the other college faculty wives, as well as the people in her affluent Toronto neighbourhood.



Alice appears at one point to be possessed by some ancient spirit, or you could be pardoned for being inclined to think that she was suffering from a mental illness/ postpartum depression at the very least. I suspected, after a while, that there was a mixture of BOTH happening here.



In her preface, the author confesses that her mother was bi-polar, and that she too suffered from periods of depression and, eventually, a mental illness (from which she most likely drew in order to write so powerfully about Alice’s battles against paranoia and the fear that she was losing her mind to a demon spirit. Well done!)

Despite the timeline confusion (which, in the end, appears to have been done on purpose, so stick with it!), I rarely wanted to put this book down. I kept reading with fascinated horror all that Alice endured. I can’t go into more details because you need to go into this blind in order to appreciate the last quarter of this novel. What a jaw-dropping “twist”… well, maybe a better word would be “reveal” – but it took my breath away when the penny finally dropped! Clever!! This is one story that does indeed live up to the blurb! All of my emotions were truly wrung and put out to dry!



I am glad that I took a chance on this NetGalley offering. I thought I was fairly knowledgeable about Indigenous sufferings at the hands of North America’s colonizers as well as our present day government, but this book was an eye-opener. I highly recommend this well-written, heartfelt novel. There are descriptions of violence and events (both historical and current) that will be a trigger for some readers, so proceed with care, but I for one am glad I stuck with this right to the nail-biting end! My thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for an ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review. I am rating this 4.8 out of 5, rounded up to a well-deserved 5.



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