Published: 2010, Harper
470 pages
Yes, another book on this blog that features death as the central theme. I seriously considered becoming a mortician after reading a short story during my freshman English class at Penn State that was actually meant to be horrifying. Everyone else was appropriately horrified, but I went right back to my dorm and started Googling what kind of educational background you need to become a mortician. Turns out, it's not much, and I probably should have pursued it because, unlike libraries, the business of death is, not surprisingly, "Recession-proof."
Enough about my obsession with death, though, and onto the purpose of this blog! Before I Fall was named on YALSA's 2011 Best Fiction for Young Adults List, which is another one of those lists that I won't shut up about. Written from Sam Kingston's first person point of view, the narrative starts out with a normal day in the life of a popular high school girl. She wakes up on February 12, is snotty to her family, puts on a slutty outfit to match her 3 best friends, goes to school and is snotty to everyone there, gets drunk, goes to a party, is snotty again, leaves the party... and that's where it gets interesting.
In the car on the way home, Sam's best friend/drunk driver Lindsay sees a flash of white and swerves into a tree, killing Sam. And then Sam wakes up, and it's February 12 again. For the next 400 pages, Sam has the opportunity to relive her last day seven times, each day discovering something new about the people who are closest to her as well as the people she was always surrounded by but never thought were worth her time.
The biggest complaint most people about this book is that Sam and her friends are not very likable characters. It's definitely true that they're snotty, stuck-up, spoiled little brats who think a little too highly of themselves, but in the end they're not totally evil and they do have many redeeming qualities. I also like that Oliver took the perspective of a "popular girl," which is pretty rare in YA literature, especially in these more serious, non-Gossip Girl books that typically come from the perspective of social outcasts (think Hannah Baker and Melinda Sordino).
In all, the book is entirely too long and the ending is kind of disappointing. There are some interesting questions raised throughout the book, but they're easy to miss among the nearly 500 pages of competing text. Entertaining, yes, but too repetitive for me to recommend. The fact that Lauren Oliver got me to read 500 pages of the same day over and over certainly says something about her writing style, though, so I won't write her off completely.
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