Sunday 21 September 2014

(ARC) Book Review (384): Falling Into Place - Amy Zhang


Falling into Place

Publication: 9th September 2014
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Pages: 304
Genre: Contemporary
Age Appropriate: Young Adult
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.
My Thoughts.
Falling Into Place has received a lot of buzz and hype from publishers and bloggers alike, with books with this this much praise I sometimes become a bit hesitant to pick them up on case I end up disappointed, however in this case I was so enamoured with this story I fell completely in love.

Amy Zhang has created a story that will have you feeling so many different emotions, the effect and impact that bullying has on not only the victim but the instigators themselves, it's always been said that bullies are people who are unhappy with themselves and so pick on other people to make themselves feel better, that is true in this book.

Liz the most popular girl in school is a bully and has destroyed many a schoolmate's lives, we come to find that Liz is just a broken, lonely and insecure girl who comes to feel remorse for all of the people that she hurt, and so instead of asking for help she decides that the world would be better off without her in it and decides to kill herself by crashing her car, but things don't go to plan and Liz doesn't die on impact.

Throughout the book with the stories of her cruelty, her unhappiness, the events leading up to her decision and her plans to take her own life, we go from disliking Liz to feeling sorry for her and wishing that she gets a second chance.

This story had me in tears quite a few times throughout this book, Amy has such a beautiful writing style that had me captivated, that will also have my buying anything that she releases in the future.

One of my favorite contemporary books of the year, this was fabulous.

So highly recommended.

I give this 5/5 stars.


Hello! I’m Amy. I write books. My debut, FALLING INTO PLACE, will be published by Greenwillow/HarperCollins in the fall of 2014. I like laughing and parentheses. I love watching soccer but can’t play it to save my life, and I love playing tennis but don’t like watching it. I hate those little toothpick/dental floss combos. I’ve always wanted to visit Prague. I paper-mached my desk using old book pages. I have a typewriter named Mattie Ann. I write on my walls. I don’t have my driver’s license. I’m scared of failure and eyelash curlers. I have very silly thumbs. The past fascinates me. Books, tea, architecture, words, and pie make me very happy. Let’s go on a quest.



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