A review by purcellibrarian
Ready to Fall by Marcella Pixley

5.0

Max starts his sophomore year after his mother died of cancer in the summer, filling his sketchbook with drawings of corpses and eyeballs.  He slowly flunks out of honors classes, completely disengaged from just about everything. What he’s engaged with instead is a conversation with the tumor in his own head which he believes switched residence from his mom’s brain to his own.  This commentary, though, has humor, which makes it seem that Max may recover.  But then he switches schools to a private academy which caters to the intellectual.  His grandmother and father are sometimes similarly isolated in their grief, and Max’s depression gives him insights that lead to his involvement in the school’s production of Macbeth.  All the characters are flawed and struggling, from the girl Fish, to Max’s English teacher, and yet maybe if enough flawed people care about you, they will catch you when you fall.