Some books are great mentors, and we know instantly while we are reading them. Other books become mentors after we have read them and have a delayed reaction. All Fall Down by Megan Hart was a great mentor after I had my delayed reaction.
Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows that I love reading because it gives me pleasure, and it is one of the things that I will carve out the time for, even if it means that I get less sleep. See my blog post 2011 Books for Mentoring.
According to How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren, there are three main reasons for reading a book: to further knowledge, for information, and entertainment. I read for all three reasons, and I also find that even when I am reading for entertainment, I am always learning new things.
The day before Christmas 2011, one of my friends gave me about a dozen books and All Fall Down
by Megan Hart was among them. I devoured all the books from my favourite authors first, then I started to read All Fall Down. The more I read, the more upset I got and yet I continued to read. I didn’t find All Fall Down entertaining, and I wasn’t reading it because I wanted to further my knowledge, or gather information about cults.
So why was I reading Megan Hart’s All Fall Down?
Sometimes when we resist things in life, we need to probe further, to see if it’s time to step out of our comfort zone. All Fall Down by Megan Hart is a novel about the Family of Superior Bliss, which is a cult, led by the charismatic zealot, John Second. Originally, the basic belief of Family of Superior Bliss was to take care of the earth and our bodies, which they call “vessels”. They did this through taking care of the environment and not consuming toxins. Along the way, the message got twisted and they lost their focus.
One morning quite early, when it was still dark outside, Sunshine’s mother, Trish, wakes her up, and tells her to take her three children and leave the compound. Sunshine is confused because the compound is the only home she has ever known. Her mother has packed a backpack with clothes for them, and gives Sunshine some money and the address of her real father.
Sunshine is confused, but listens to her mother and escapes to a world that is very unfamiliar to her. Unknown to her, shortly after her escape, John Second and his cult followers commit mass suicide. In the mean time, Sunshine shows up on her father’s doorstep with three children in tow. Sunshine’s father didn’t even know that he had a child. When Trish decided to leave him nearly 20 years earlier, she claimed that the child she was carrying wasn’t his, and he took her at her word.
Hart uses a lot of flashbacks as a literary device to tell her story, and I hate them, I like it when a story is told in chronological order. Even though I do not like flashbacks, they happen to work well in this instance. The story unsettled me and I got upset with Sunshine and wanted her to get on with it. But she cannot get on with it because she lives what she knows, and that’s life.
Sunshine grew up in the community of the Family of Superior Bliss. The family unit teaches us how to live and interact with others for meaningful relationships. The problem is that the Family of Superior Bliss has a misguided view of the family and the way it should work. Sunshine is not quite 20 years old, yet she has three children, who have different fathers. She is sexually abused, but she doesn’t know that, because that’s what happens in the community in which she lives.
The Family of Superior Bliss is very patriarchal, and they withhold information from the followers, which takes away choices from them, and makes them dependent on the leader. Sunshine has a touch of rebelliousness inside her, because she would often steal some of the food because they were never fed sufficiently. The people in the community were brainwashed, and if they did something wrong they would confess, but Sunshine never did, so that says something about her character.
Most of the story focuses on after she leaves the Family of Superior Bliss compound, and you get to see Sunshine struggling to fit it. She is quite vulnerable, and the unfortunate thing is that the leader of a splinter group that had left the Family of Superior Bliss refuses to leave her alone, and keeps on showing up at her place of work. She breaks down and goes to see what this new community is like, but she doesn’t take her children with her.
Sunshine doesn’t join the splinter group, though she talks to Josiah, the leader, on the telephone. She is hospitalized and receiving counseling, while her father, Christopher, and his wife Liesel take care of her three children. They shower a lot of love on the children. Sunshine needs some time alone to heal and to get to know herself. She became a mother when she was still a child – John Second and his other sexual predators robbed Sunshine of her childhood. At first I hated the way the story ended, but upon reflection, it was very hopeful, and I realize that she was going to make it. After all, she is indeed a rebel at heart.
After deep contemplation, I realized that the greatest lesson in All Fall Down by Megan Hart is that if you want to get rid of a bad habit, make sure that you have a better one to replace it with. If you leave a void, more than likely you will go back to the old, because it’s familiar and what you know.
Sunshine was brainwashed at The Family of Superior Bliss community, and after she left, she had some sessions with Dr. Braddock, who helped with the deprogramming process. Sunshine needs to experience how a real family functions as a unit, to succeed in the world. Eventually she will get there.
All Fall Down by Megan Hart will be out this month, I got an advanced uncorrected proof copy. I recommend All Fall Down by Megan Hart though I won’t say that I enjoyed it, but sometimes we have to read difficult material to get a better sense of this world that we live in.
Interesting Tidbit About All Fall Down by Megan Hart
Some of you may be wondering about the title of the book. It so happens that in the story, Sunshine’s children played “Ring a Ring o' Roses”, which is a nursery rhyme.
“A ring, a ring o' roses,
A pocket full o’posies-
Atishoo atishoo
We all fall down.”
If you cannot view the YouTube video of “Ring a Ring o' Roses”, click here.
There are a few versions of the nursery rhyme, but the one I have included is the one I played as a child growing up in Jamaica.
All Fall Down
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Video Credit: Uploaded by Jangiankotla on Apr 12, 2009