The Fall-Down Effect by Liz Johnston and reviewed by Ken Wilson

Review by Ken Wilson

Ken Wilson is a book reviewer and author of Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place From the Side of the Road (University of Regina Press, 2025). His second book, Walking Well, will appear in 2026. Read his writing at Readingandwalking.com. Ken is a settler who grew up in the Haldimand Tract in southwestern Ontario. He lives on Treaty 4 territory in oskana kâ-asastêki (Regina, Saskatchewan), where he is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Regina. Read Ken's author Q&A, or listen to his audio essay about writing Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place From the Side of the Road.

Read Liz Johnston's Q&A. The Fall-Down Effect by Liz Johnston and reviewed by Ken Wilson. Find the publisher's description of The Fall-Down Effect by Liz Johnston (Book*hug Press, 2026, $24.95) beneath Ken's review.

The Fall-Down Effect by Liz Johnston and reviewed by Ken Wilson

The Fall-Down Effect by Liz Johnston and reviewed by Ken Wilson

While I was reading Liz Johnston’s novel, The Fall-Down Effect, the news was full of updates about massive fires in British Columbia, heatwaves and droughts in Europe, temperature records being shattered—all signs of the damage we’ve done to the ecosystems that sustain us by burning fossil fuels. Of course, the society we’ve constructed needs to burn fossil fuels, the way it needs to cut down forests. We could change our behaviour, but change is difficult, and for the most part we have trouble imagine living differently.

The story The Fall-Down Effect tells takes place against the intensifying climate crisis and, more broadly, our extractive way of living, making it timely and worth reading. That story is, in part, a domestic one. It follows a family over three decades, focusing on three essential years in the characters’ lives: 1989, 2001, and the pandemic year of 2020. The father, Tom, and mother, Lynn, were environmental activists who met in the late 1970s during protests against clearcutting B.C. forests. Tom’s activism cools after the family moves to a town in the B.C. interior; Lynn’s remains red hot. The political, emotional, and sexual tensions between Tom and Lynn are driving them apart. Their children, Sophie, Fern, and River, end up taking political positions somewhere between those of their parents.

We know from the first page that Fern is likely to be the most radical; during a game of hide-and-seek, she climbs a tall hemlock tree, squeezing herself into its bark, inhaling its scent. It’s hard to imagine her making peace with the logging industry that employs nearly everyone in their town, and she doesn’t. Like her mother, Fern comes to believe that saving the planet requires direct action. The effect of that action on others, especially her family, doesn’t matter—until it does. What do we owe to those who are close to us, and what do we owe to the wider world, including its more-than-human inhabitants? Are we merely atoms, floating freely, unattached from anything else? the book asks. Or are we molecules, tightly bound to each other? If we are molecules, what happens when the bond between us is broken?

The novel’s title refers to a phenomenon in the forestry industry: when old-growth trees are cut down, the forests that are replanted are less valuable, less productive. What has been lost cannot be regained. Those new forests are more like plantations than they are like ecosystems, too; they’ll never be what they were. The damage can’t be repaired. Many of the relationships in The Fall-Down Effect are like that. When the people in those relationships hurt each other, that damage can’t be repaired, either, at least not completely. Scars remain. This novel doesn’t offer an optimistic view of how we connect with each other or the way we take from the earth without considering the consequences. Johnston is realistic about both of those things. The book isn’t all bleak, though. Some relationships do begin to heal, eventually, even if they’re unlikely to be the same as they once were.

Johnston, one of the editors of Brick: A Literary Journal, has published stories and essays, and The Fall-Down Effect is her first novel. It’s ambitious, broad in narrative and thematic scope, and well-realized. I found it hard to put down, and I’m sure other readers will find it gripping, too. Its biggest strength is the way that its characters and narrative fit together with the difficult questions it raises. A week after I finished reading The Fall-Down Effect, I’m still thinking about those questions, wondering how I might answer them. When a novel does that, I think it’s a success.

Description of The Fall-Down Effect by Liz Johnston (Book*hug Press, 2026, $24.95)

Exploring protest, climate change, and fractured family relationships, Liz Johnston’s eagerly anticipated debut novel, The Fall-Down Effect, asks what we really owe people in our lives when we are fighting for a greater cause.

As a child in the late 1980s, Fern is the wild heart of her tree-hugging family—quick-tempered and yearning to spend every minute in the woods of the small Pacific Northwest logging town where they live. She is also most like her environmental activist mother, Lynn, who chafes against the demands of motherhood and yearns for the protests of her youth. As tensions escalate, Lynn leaves her partner, Tom, and their three children, telling herself she will devote her life more fully to fighting for the earth.

At nineteen, Fern commits her own radical act of protest, which authorities label ecoterrorism. When Fern goes underground, her parents and siblings—responsible grad student Sylvia and budding artist River—struggle to make sense of her actions while also trying to cover up her absence. Fern’s secret proves impossible to keep, and when she becomes a wanted woman, the rest of the family trades blame. Years later, when Lynn takes shelter from a forest fire in the home she left so many years before, the family is forced to confront their regrets during a fraught, baggage-filled reunion.