Before I Fall

Hoping Lauren will read this, here goes:The main reason I found this book, is because I had a dream in which I was dying. I dreamed I was in the middle of a car-jacking and while trying to escape, I was shot. As soon as I was shot, I got out of my body and saw the blood and the hole in my throat. I got out of the car, and was dragging myself on the very avenue, and all I thought was how greatful I was of the life I'd lived and the people I'd met. This dream was actually very shocking to me, I spent days moved by it, by how real it had felt, by all that happened in it. I went on the internet and made a research under the topic of having a dream of dying, don't exactly remember the keywords. One of the things that came up was Lauren Oliver's book "Before I Fall". In october 2010 my first dog whom I'd lived with for years, had ups and downs with and simply adored, died in my arms, thankfully. This past february the second dog, a baby of no more than two years, whom I'd just fallen in love with(having clear that you can fall in love with anything and anyone and there's different ways of it happening), he was the light of my world, he helped me heal my first dog's death and was simply amazing. He died, not in my arms, which hurt more.My point with all this story -I hope it stays here because it is part of the whole review, it completes it- I was looking for things to teach me about death, I was looking for this book from way before any of them died, because of that touching dream. Of all the times I had tried to find it, not once did I do so. Not in the bookstore(I went there a couple of times looking specifically for it), and not in here because the two times I was looking for it, it wasn't available. Until just a few weeks ago, I finally ordered it, and read it in about two days, three tops.I believe it is an amazing book. I understand that some people are not pleased with the bullying and how it got dealt with. I would have loved it if Sam had left a letter on what she lived before she closed the momentum of her death. But that's just something I would add in my mind or do myself if I went through that. Also the bullying was handled differently because it was not the main topic, death was. To me, it was about enough to read the line in which Sam said Lindsay would figure it out someday, everyone has to. "Before I Fall" is a master-piece to me. Leaving aside the usual stuff that's observed like the way it's written and the themes, the way everything is done, what happens, the language(terms such as 'vibration' and the things she saw)how she changes, how she grows even when she is dead, the statements and concepts proposed in the whole book and more are just brave and beautiful and amazing. The book deals with death, and the way it does it, how it is all a process and the things that happen, can help one, like it did with me, to learn to deal with death better.I have been trying to understand the concepts of what happens after death, from my point of view, learn to deal with the death of my beloved babies, but it has been so hard... finishing this book today, crying all the way with it in my hands, many times of which I had to halt cause it was too much, it has helped me to comprehend, internalize the happening that death and life are, one same thing, one couldn't exist without the other, one couldn't make sense without the other. I finally have come to terms with life and death, began to let go, let be. Accept. This and so much more has happened with this book as a help. It has been a wonderful journey reading the book and I look forward to reading more from Lauren.Thanks for this wonderful work Lauren Oliver.Ps:I guess you need to have a reason and an awakened sense of correspondence when reading a book, or else you will find faults continously in many or all of them. I am an avid reader and a writer and it doesn't fail that every time I read a book, there's something that is knocking the door in my life for me to grasp the essense of a situation going on, something I am not getting or stuck at, and the books are there to help me... and I always grow more and more, endlessly.Also, I don't have to remotely say that I recomend the book for people who have a reason to read it, for people who feel attracted to it, otherweise, think about it twice cause it's long and needs profound thought and feeling.

Day one had me mad, day two confused, day three disgusted, day and 5 wishful, day 6 optimistic and day 7 hopeful. In the end, I felt all the ranges of emotions. The growth of Sam was well worth the revolving emotions.

This is one of the best YA books I've read in a long while. Part Groundhog Day, part The Source Code, part Judy Blume, part The Lovely Bones - all itself.We start with a high school girl, Sam, who dies in a car accident, and is doomed(?) to repeat the last day of her life again and again. Seven times to be exact. Sound like a recipe for repetition? It's not.First of all the writing is lovely. Really lovely. I've read perhaps 50+ first person girl narratives in the last year alone and this one had the best voice. It's fairly well tied with Mary E. Pearson in that regard for recent entries (Judy Blume still wins for lifetime achievement). It's funny clever without the annoying Snark. The voice is so good that it just drags you through the entire book, and it's a pretty long book for YA. Lauren Oliver really is a lovely writer. The dialogue is good, the narrative description and interior monologue are amazing, and even the flowery interstitial description that glues together connected days is short but evocative. The Lovely Bones also had great voice, and a tremendous first half, before it fell apart into an abysmal mess of moral apathy. Before I fall is better.There are some things worth noting. The characterization and the high school realism is top notch. I was reminded a bit of a modern Freaks and Geeks in that there was that kind of insightful tragio-comic realism. These girls felt pretty darn real. Even the minor characters had some depth. It's this more than anything else that echoed the master of all YA: Judy Blume. Blume uses dialogue more liberally, as it's her main method of characterization. Oliver prefers interior monologue and narrative description. The net result is similar. There's a lot of detail here too, but the voice manages to make it interesting. Sam and her friends are popular girls, and more than a little bitchy, but they don't extend into characterture. They are a little bad, but not too bad -- realistically so. This is no melodramatic Gossip Girl. There is plenty of drinking, rudeness, etc. The sexuality is muted. Handled well enough, but perhaps a bit tamer than it could have been.Now as to structure. Oliver does a really first notch job repeating the same day seven times without ever being dull. Sam makes different choices, and on some days this plays out very differently. One time she doesn't even go to school. Still, even when the same scenes are repeated, and they are, different angles are shown, revealing and painting from different directions. This is hard to do, and must have taken considerable planning and rewriting. I'm actually facing a bit of this myself in my second novel, which is a time travel book and involves overlap and revisiting.I'm going to stop for a second to pontificate on writing this kind of fiction. One of the things that makes this work in Before I Fall is the loose structure of the high school day. Sam's day includes: getting up, driving with her friends to school, various classes, lunch, ditching, hanging out after school, and the party. These events flow from one to the next because of the inherent structure. If she skips lunch, or English class, she can pick back up on the schedule, because it's immutable and set at a level greater than herself. This it has in common with Back to the Future I and II. There the structure of the dance forms a background on which Marty can play. In my own story, I have been trying to revisit a complex action scene multiple times. The whole scene -- even the first time -- folds out from the actions of the protagonist without any background structure, which makes altering that flow... complex.In any case, in Before I Fall there is a also a very strongly structured arc, like, Groundhog Day, the protagonist has to learn a series of lessons from the failures of the first and subsequent trials. Much like a video game level, she gets to play it over and over again until she gets it right. This is very satisfying to read. Too bad real life doesn't work like that.The seven day structure also helps avoid the dreaded "reveal" problem. There is no giant structural reveal, the premise is setup in the first couple pages, and so the book does not suffer from the first half being better than the second. It races right on to the end. But there is an end, and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it. Given the options, Oliver chose a pretty good one, and it does leave one with a deep sense of catharsis. So it was probably the right choice. Still the looming shadow over the entire affair left me with a deep sense of sadness not unlike that caused by reading The Time Traveler's Wife (the excellent book, not the mediocre film).