And Then She Fell

April 1, 2023

In And Then She Fell, from Canadian best-selling Mohawk author Elliott, a new mother writing a modern version of her people's Haudenosaunee creation story starts hearing voices, losing fragments of time, and finding folks in the wealthy neighborhood where she lives with white academic husband increasingly hostile. Prepub Alert.

Copyright 2023 Library Journal

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 15, 2023
A tale of compromise, madness, and recuperation by a Mohawk writer in Ontario. Alice, a young Mohawk woman and new mother to a baby girl named Dawn, finds herself living comfortably in Toronto, married to a white man whose academic specialty happens to be her own culture. Unsettling encounters with prying neighbors, whose racism emerges in both subtle and obvious ways, mark the beginning of Alice's deteriorating mental health. Her salvation, as she understands it, is to retell the Haudenosaunee Creation Story, though an increasing paranoia and apparent psychosis complicate her efforts. This novel seems, in part, like a contemporary, Indigenized retelling of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's classic short story "The Yellow Wallpaper," with the first-person narration here similarly highlighting not just a woman's descent into insanity, but the bigotries and toxic power relations that structure society. Alice's observations, however unreliable they become, suggest above all the significance of cultural erasure and appropriation for Indigenous peoples, the ongoing impact of policies of cultural genocide, and the rest of the country's routine incomprehension of or indifference to Indigenous suffering. Particularly intriguing is the representation of Alice's self-doubt as she attempts to modernize a traditional story without betraying it and the people it represents. As she asks herself, in a passage that seems to sum up a conundrum facing many contemporary Indigenous artists: "Is there a definite, observable moment where interpretation becomes bastardization? If there is I'm flirting with it. I mean, I'm writing my people's Creation Story--the story that lays out our entire worldview as Haudenosaunee--in the voice of a gossipy, irreverent young woman when common sense (and stereotypes) say I should be writing it in the voice of a sage old Indian man." A tale of injustice and veiled persecution seen through a fevered imagination.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

August 1, 2023
Alice has done everything right: married the perfect man, settled down in the suburbs, become a new mother to a beautiful baby girl. But something is haunting her. In Alice's new home, voices call from the trees, roaches stop and stare, and Alice's nightmares are relentless. This first novel from Elliott (A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, 2020) is an evocative, cerebral study of womanhood, identity, and selfhood wrapped in Haudenosaunee legend. Elliott plots Alice's loss of identity and weakening grip on reality with urgency and heart, exploring the horror that comes with losing control of one's body, life, and sense of self. Of all the terror Alice feels, the sinking, ever-present feeling that she does not belong is the worst. Often funny, often chilling, And Then She Fell studies an Indigenous woman's unraveling in a world that she's ashamed to feel so disconnected from, and Elliott tells her story with assuredness and weight.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

August 14, 2023
Elliott (A Mind Spread Out on the Ground) expertly mines the challenges faced by a Mohawk woman as her world threatens to fall apart in this ambitious offering. New mother Alice has moved from the Six Nations reservation to Toronto with her white husband, Steve, and their newborn, Dawn, but now lives with an “inescapable feeling of hopelessness.” As Alice tries to write a “modern retelling of the Haudenosaunee Creation Story” while surrounded by racist neighbors, she feels disconnected from her baby, processes guilt over her mother’s recent death, and worries she’s just a trophy wife as Steve pursues tenure as an anthropologist studying Mohawk culture (“Everything Indigenous seems to have more value when it’s utilized by white folks”). Meanwhile, a voice first heard in childhood through the Disney movie character Pocahontas has begun communicating with Alice once again, as are trees and insects, and she inadvertently discovers a portal to another world. As the reality Alice is clinging to becomes more unstable, she must interpret the creation story for herself to understand the importance of her own life and those of other Mohawk women. This novel is part time travel and part horror, as full of heart as it is bold. Agent: Stephanie Sinclair, CookeMcDermid.