Falling into Place Review

Trigger Warning: This book deals with the topics of suicide, depression, abortions, drugs, along with a few other heavier topics.

Falling into Place is the debut novel of Amy Zhang, and it deals with girl named Liz Emerson who crashes her car into a tree and tries to make her suicide look like an accident. It's told both in the present and in flashbacks with a mysterious narrator. There will be spoilers on a few things so beware.

This book left me feeling a whole lot of different emotions: hope, disappointment, and sadness. This wasn't a bad book, but it wasn't a great book either. I had problems with characters and the narrator and topics and everything else. This was just not my type of book.

We'll start with characters and the narrator first. Liz, Kennie, and Julia are three best friends who have been inseparable since 6th grade. They've been to parties, have humiliated people, been through Kennie's abortion together. They did everything together. These characters are the definition of preppy high school girls. They're mean and they humiliate people without caring. They're what everyone wants to be like but no one actually likes. Julia wasn't bad because she was different than the rest of them, but she was into drugs so was she really any better than the rest of them? I don't know. None of these characters left a real impression on me. I was rooting for Liz to live, but I felt no connection towards her. The narrator is supposed to be "surprising" and "shocking" but I guessed it 10% in the book, and I couldn't have been more disappointed. I expected someone crazy or someone who used to be friends with her until they grew up but she always still cared for her. No, that's not at all what happened. It was her/her imaginary friend. The story lost so much to me when I realized it. That's not surprising or shocking. It's kind of a cop out narrator; where's the imagination in a narrator?

The book surrounded the party scene with the drugs and alcohol and the whole nine yards and it felt too cliché for the popular girls to be at the best parties drinking the best alcohol or doing the strongest drugs. I just wanted more from this book. I didn't love the way the book was written with the flashbacks and the nonlinear writing style. I guess I expected a completely different story than what I got and that's okay. I was left uncomfortable with some of the scenes and left missing something from others.

2/5 Stars