Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver
My rating: 4/5 cats
well, well, well,
this one was a surprise.
yes, teen fiction, you have won me over, but usually it is the stuff on the “oh, no, the world has been essploded!!” or “oh, no – all the cats in the world have turned evil and are coming for us!!” end of the spectrum that captivates me.
realistic teen fiction usually leaves me cold.
and this is realistic teen fiction with a twist, obviously. this is groundhog day with a jerky teen girl in the jerky bill murray role. but all the day-to-day bits in between are simple, realistic teen fiction.
and it won me over. i could not stop reading this book. i was totally sucked into the story, the narrator’s “do thoughtless things unto others” mentality, and the comeuppance. (oh, i love justice. i love comeuppance) samantha is pretty and popular and easily swayed. seduced by the cult of lindsay, she forgets how to be a decent person and gets brainwashed into performing casual cruelties without even thinking about them; they become her default setting, so much so that she doesn’t even remember half of them. those may be my favorite scenes, when a character is reminding samantha of some mean thing she has done and she doesn’t even remember. it has become such a knee-jerk response for her – to be mean, that it is not even conscious enough for her to retain memories of it. good stuff.
there are a ton of weakly-written moments/characters/subplots but there is just so much momentum to the story that you barely notice it while you are reading, and only really notice it if, say, you start sitting down to write a book review of it.
the party scene/s is/are very well-written, though. i didn’t drink in high school because i observed how idiotic teenagers were when intoxicated, so i never went to parties. i hosted small gatherings at my house where i would cook, let’s call them “munchies,” for a select group of friends and everyone was calm and chill and nothing got broken and no one puked and the music was good. those party scenes terrified me. i cannot think of anything worse than a drunken teen party. even when i was a teen. i loved this book, but all the characters were awful. they are always laughing over stupid things, and you can just feel that laughter – shrill and desperate and competitive. picture that drunk. oooh, no thanks.
favorite line – after a passage about clothing conformity in her school, It’s Connecticut: being like the people around you is the whole point.
surprisingly good read.
damn you, teen fiction!
