I was actually planning on not posting new entries for a while… given that the summer holidays are here and I won’t be able to tell my students to do homework online any longer… But I recently finished reading the wonderful YA novel Before I fall, by Lauren Oliver, and I just knew I had to give it to Elise, a bilingual student from Holland who is in 3rd year ESO B. And she just handed me her review today, and I just had to post it!!!
So here it goes, all in Elise’s own words… Highly recommended from Elise and from me… I just love Lauren Oliver, she is one of the most gifted writers in youth literature today.
This book is about a girl named Sam, a popular girl enrolled in a typical American high school. It’s a Friday, Cupid’s Day. A guy that she was once friends with, Kent, throws a party and invites the whole school. Naturally, Sam and her friends, Lindsay, Elody and Ally, show up. The party passes by like any other would, except for that it ends in a rather unfortunate way: the girls end up in a car crash, in which Sam dies.
However, Sam wakes up the next morning. It’s Friday, again, another Cupid’s Day. The days passes, Sam blames the feeling of familiarity, of having done all of it before, on deja-vus. They visit the party again, she dies in the car crash a second time.
She spends the next days, all Fridays, trying to avoid dying in the car crash, finding out that her friends aren’t exactly who she thought they were, falling out of love with her airhead boyfriend and getting closer and closer to her childhood friend Kent.
She also finds out that Juliet “Psycho” Syke, a girl they used to make fun of at school, commits suicide every single Friday that she is stuck reliving over and over again. Sam and her friends might very well be the cause of it. Now she isn’t only keen on on getting herself out of the cycle of endless Fridays, but she is also trying to talk Juliet out of taking her own life. She ends up sacrificing herself for the girl, and is finally able to free herself.
I loved this book. It took me a few tries to get into it… Sam’s popularity and shallow ways of doing everything are terribly annoying when you first begin reading… but when you finally get past the first part, t’s hard to put the book down. I like how the story itself is kind of a sad one, but it isn’t written that way. Instead it’s funny, and incredibly moving towards the end.
This novel is highly recommended!
So hurry up and read it!
And if you are still not convinced you can watch the book trailer for this novel on Vimeo!
