Book Review: Falling into Place

About the Book:

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 narrator, this heart-breaking and nonlinear novel pieces together the short and devastating life of Meridian High’s most popular junior girl. How do we impact one another? How do our actions reverberate? What does it mean to love someone? To be a friend? 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.

About the Author: 

Amy Zhang is originally from Wisconsin and currently attends college in upstate New York. This is her first book.


The Review:


Liz Emerson has decided to crash her car using Newton’s Laws of Motion. But unfortunately for her, she doesn’t understand the physics behind it enough to know exactly how to crash her car in order to die on impact. She had concocted an almost perfect plan where in her suicide would look like an accident. She had even made three rules about the day she would end things. However, when the time comes, all of those three rules are broken.

Liz Emerson was one of the prettiest, most popular high school students in the school. She had the world at her fingertips. She was savage and she could tear anyone down. She was infamous for making plans that solely focused on the destruction of others. By the time she was a junior in high school, she had left a trail of bodies of people who used to be in her wake.

Like many other books, this too was sitting in my Nook Book. When I started reading it last night I began to realize that our feelings and thoughts and actions are what we manifest how we become as people. Liz was a deeply unhappy person. She has darkness inside of her that she had never come to terms with. She has issues that she has never even tried to get to the bottom of. She had people who cared and she cared about them too…but just not enough.

That not enough is what is almost always the tipping point. For people to want to give up because they think no one would notice if they stopped existing. This is always far from the truth because there is more to life than just cause and effect! Falling Into Place is a novel that uses non-linear timeline and an unlikely narrator to make one understand that our exteriors often don’t mirror what is going on in our minds.

Amy Zhang’s debut leaves you with a lot to think about. Especially reflect on the fact that how we treat others sometimes bounces back to us and we are left grappling and wondering how on earth we ended up this way! Please do read this book because it explores quite a bit into the psyche of the human mind. Especially a high school teenager who seemed to think she did not deserve the world!

Favourite Quote:

I wish second chances were real.

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