Review: Falling Into Place by Amy Zhang

Falling Into Place by Amy Zhang
Published : September 9, 2014

Summary: “On the day Liz Emerson tries to die, they had reviewed Newton’s laws of motion in physics class. Then, after school, she put them into practice by running her Mercedes off the road.

Why? Why did Liz Emerson decide that the world would be better off without her? Why did she give up? Vividly told by an unexpected and surprising narrator, this heartbreaking and nonlinear novel pieces together the short and devastating life of Meridian High’s most popular junior girl. Mass, acceleration, momentum, force—Liz didn’t understand it in physics, and even as her Mercedes hurtles toward the tree, she doesn’t understand it now. How do we impact one another? How do our actions reverberate? What does it mean to be a friend? To love someone? To be a daughter? Or a mother? Is life truly more than cause and effect? Amy Zhang’s haunting and universal story will appeal to fans of Lauren Oliver, Gayle Forman, and Jay Asher”

Fist off I’d like to say that I personally, haven’t read If I Stay by Gayle Forman yet, but I’ve heard that if you like that book, that this is something very similar to I recommend it to those people.

I’d also like to start this review with a disclaimer that I’m not the biggest contemporary fan. I picked this book up on a whim from my daily BookBub e-mails that send me e-book deals. So I think I got this book for like 99 cents or something and I didn’t really expect to like it. But holy crap it kind of hooked me from start to finish. I’ve been having a crazy few weeks with moving my boyfriend into his new home, job searching, interviews and just helping out my mom whose recently come home from a five month stay at the hospital. I’ve been in a reading slump/had no time to read.

So last night I thought, well, I’m not in the mood to keep reading The Goblet of Fire, and I’m not really in the mood for Egg & Spoon. So I dove into this hoping for the best.

And Amy Zhang just wrote this is such an interesting way that I couldn’t put it down.  This book is written in a non-linar way (so it doesn’t go chronologically it jumps from past and present). And it’s about this girl Liz who decides to end her life by crashing her car. And her classmate finds her and the book just goes back and forth between Liz’s wrong-doings and her life and relationship between her mother, her friends, her enemies, her classmates, her teachers, and so on and so forth. The book though is written in a narration that isn’t Liz. At first I thought it was her dead father but when they started referencing the dad, I knew it wasn’t him. But the narrator ends up being Liz’s imaginary friend from when she was a child.

I really enjoyed this book because it just kind of made you question how your actions really effect other people. And why do you do the things you do/done. It kind of pushes the limits and had you sit back for a second and just kind of question yourself and what you’ve done and if you have done anything negative, why and how did it effect certain people. I think Zhang wrote this book with a better purpose than just a story and entertainment, and I have to tip my hat to her.

I admit I did shed a few tears towards the end but, overall this book has my good graces and many rounds of applause. The narration was great, the writing was wonderful, light and easy to just breeze through. Almost as though each and every single word was chosen so carefully. Each character was broken down slowly and almost to a point where they were just completely stripped and you knew the ins and outs of everyone and each person was just so different and had their own little world of issues and strengths and weaknesses.

All in all this book was just, pure genius. Complex yet simple, and beautifully thought provoking and heart-wrenching.