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A review by carlisajc
Before I Fall Enhanced by Lauren Oliver
4.0
If you could choose which day would be the last day of your life, which would it be? The day you graduated high school? College, perhaps? The day you got married? The day you had your first child?
The thing about life, though, is that you don’t get to choose. You don’t really ever know when something will be your last: your last morning. Your last laugh. Your last kiss. Your last goodbye. Your last day. These are unknown and, therefore, under-appreciated. People subconsciously assume that nothing is going to happen to them, that they’re invincible. Truth is, they’re not. You’re not. And this book brings that message to life.
Sam Kingston is a popular 17-year-old senior. She skips classes, she goes to parties, she has a boyfriend. But all that changes when, on the way home from a party on Friday, February the 12th, she and her friends get in a car crash and she dies. But then, she wakes up…on Friday, February the 12th and lives through this day again. And again. And again. She lives through this day a total of seven times.
Like the popular high school group of girls, they make fun of others around them. What’s interesting about this story, though, is that I feel as if it questions this “bully-victim relationship.” In a typical story like this, the girl realizes that her friends are not-very-nice people and she realizes that she’s better than that and she becomes best friends with the same people that they spent years harassing. That’s not the case in this story and it’s definitely not the case in real life. Without giving away any crucial details, I just wanted to mention a really beautiful point in the story: It’s on the seventh day and she’s just thinking about her group of friends. She names three things that she loves about each of her best friends – Lindsay, Elody, and Ally. This is after Sam has realized the awful things that they’ve done over the years. She still loves them and she still finds beauty in them, and I find beauty in that. It’s just an interesting and unique perspective to find the “bullies” not cast down as the awful, the cruel, and the unforgivable.
So, the negatives: (1) There is talk about sex, though none actually occurs. There is some language, talk of drugs and drinking. So, basically, this is not a book for your middle-schooler. If it was a movie, it would be PG-13, nothing worse than that. (2) I sometimes felt like there was a disconnect between Sam’s thoughts and her voice. Lauren Oliver is a beautiful writer. She knows how to express things with vivid imagery and breathtaking diction, and that is expressed through the though processes of Sam Kingston. But…this book is written in the first person. So, Lauren Oliver’s beautiful and vivid writing is taken as Sam’s thoughts. And, at least in the beginning, there is a major disconnect between Sam’s beautifully-written thought processes and the dialogue that she actually said. For example, in the beginning, her favorite word seems to be the eloquently-stated “Obv.” Despite this, I do think her character develops throughout the story where the disconnect didn’t seem as present at the end. But in the beginning, it’s there and it did kind of annoy me at times.
But, overall, this is a wonderful book that sucked me right in. I read the almost 500 pg. book in three days – a short time for a full-time student and part-time library worker. It’s a good read. It’s a fast read. It’s a read with a beautiful message. I say, read it.
Full review here: http://confessionsofcarlisa.com/2014/11/24/before-i-fall-a-book-review/
The thing about life, though, is that you don’t get to choose. You don’t really ever know when something will be your last: your last morning. Your last laugh. Your last kiss. Your last goodbye. Your last day. These are unknown and, therefore, under-appreciated. People subconsciously assume that nothing is going to happen to them, that they’re invincible. Truth is, they’re not. You’re not. And this book brings that message to life.
Sam Kingston is a popular 17-year-old senior. She skips classes, she goes to parties, she has a boyfriend. But all that changes when, on the way home from a party on Friday, February the 12th, she and her friends get in a car crash and she dies. But then, she wakes up…on Friday, February the 12th and lives through this day again. And again. And again. She lives through this day a total of seven times.
Like the popular high school group of girls, they make fun of others around them. What’s interesting about this story, though, is that I feel as if it questions this “bully-victim relationship.” In a typical story like this, the girl realizes that her friends are not-very-nice people and she realizes that she’s better than that and she becomes best friends with the same people that they spent years harassing. That’s not the case in this story and it’s definitely not the case in real life. Without giving away any crucial details, I just wanted to mention a really beautiful point in the story: It’s on the seventh day and she’s just thinking about her group of friends. She names three things that she loves about each of her best friends – Lindsay, Elody, and Ally. This is after Sam has realized the awful things that they’ve done over the years. She still loves them and she still finds beauty in them, and I find beauty in that. It’s just an interesting and unique perspective to find the “bullies” not cast down as the awful, the cruel, and the unforgivable.
So, the negatives: (1) There is talk about sex, though none actually occurs. There is some language, talk of drugs and drinking. So, basically, this is not a book for your middle-schooler. If it was a movie, it would be PG-13, nothing worse than that. (2) I sometimes felt like there was a disconnect between Sam’s thoughts and her voice. Lauren Oliver is a beautiful writer. She knows how to express things with vivid imagery and breathtaking diction, and that is expressed through the though processes of Sam Kingston. But…this book is written in the first person. So, Lauren Oliver’s beautiful and vivid writing is taken as Sam’s thoughts. And, at least in the beginning, there is a major disconnect between Sam’s beautifully-written thought processes and the dialogue that she actually said. For example, in the beginning, her favorite word seems to be the eloquently-stated “Obv.” Despite this, I do think her character develops throughout the story where the disconnect didn’t seem as present at the end. But in the beginning, it’s there and it did kind of annoy me at times.
But, overall, this is a wonderful book that sucked me right in. I read the almost 500 pg. book in three days – a short time for a full-time student and part-time library worker. It’s a good read. It’s a fast read. It’s a read with a beautiful message. I say, read it.
Full review here: http://confessionsofcarlisa.com/2014/11/24/before-i-fall-a-book-review/