Before I Fall

If you read book blogs, and obviously you do, you will know this book already.  That's why I picked it up myself, having read the great reviews along with the description of the plot, which seemed like a pretty cool idea.

"Maybe you can afford to wait. Maybe for you there's a tomorrow. Maybe for you there's one thousand tomorrows, or three thousand, or ten, so much time you can bathe in it, roll around it, let it slide like coins through you fingers. So much time you can waste it. 

But for some of us there's only today. And the truth is, you never really know."

Sam and her posse are the Cordelia Chase crowd of Thomas Jefferson High School in Connecticut, picking on everything that walks, making life hell for the loneliest and the saddest, the most unpopular kids.  Now zoom in on Sam - popular, mean, cruel, and shallow, right?  Well that all begins to change when her friend Lindsay drives them off the road on February 12th, killing Sam.  Next thing she knows, she wakes up to her alarm - on February 12th - seven times.  Each day is another life for Sam, another chance for her to turn things around, to affect different people in different ways, but most importantly to learn what it is to be alive.

Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver is an intense, breathless trip around the microcosm of teenage life in suburban America.  And Samantha Kingston is the perfect voice for it - her passionate, heartfelt telling of her life (and death) story will keep you turning pages into the night without even realizing it.  The characters that Samantha manipulates and connects with throughout her seven days of soul-searching become whole and real people, "patched and stitched together and not quite right." And Ms. Oliver's writing brings us right to the scene chapter after chapter with believable dialog, perfect teenage perspective and scenes that seem almost magical, they're so well done and affecting - so much so that the 470 pages seem more like 100, and it's over before you're ready to leave Sam and her friends to the Fates.

I couldn't stop flipping the pages of this once I started, and I'm so glad I gave it a chance.  It's even one of those you buy and lend out, then never get back.  I must admit that after reading The Society of S and discovering the 4.5-star Amazon rating, I was beginning to believe that maybe today's YA is just not the "genre" for me.  The same-old, same-old vampire tale, or the leather-clad tough chick with major attitude - I've read it all before, no?  Not this time - don't let me, or yourself, think like that, folks.  Like Sam, we might miss out on something great, something beautiful ... something to be read, and lent out, and never get back.