Review: 'Falling into Place'

Falling into Place
By Amy Zhang
YA contemporary realistic fiction
September 2014
Greenwillow Books
ISBN: 978-0062295040
                                                                                                                    
Liz Emerson doesn't care that she is beautiful, well-off, popular and has a boyfriend the other girls envy. The sham of how her life appears on the surface is brilliantly depicted in the debut novel by Amy Zhang, herself a teenager, in a nihilistic story of a girl who has had enough and is determined to kill herself.

Drinking, drug use, casual hooking up, debilitating bullying, Liz and her circle do it all. Liz and her boyfriend are cruel and unfaithful to each other. She does horrible things to her friends, who stand by her even though they carry the wounds of those things. There is one boy who still cares about Liz despite the horrible thing she did to him. Her mother is never around; she's trekking around the world for work since Liz's father died years ago and can afford to buy a very fancy car for her daughter to deliberately drive off the road.

There is no suspense that Liz will drive that car off the road. There is suspense in what happens afterward and parts of the story are not revealed until the very final pages.

It is a horribly sad world these teens live in. Their hope was killed in them long ago. Moments of happiness are depicted mainly because their absence is another way to show what a horribly sad world these teens live in.

Zhang keeps the story flowing with frequent time jumps and short bursts of story. There is the addition of a mystery narrator who occasionally comments on Liz's life ever since her father accidentally died in front of her when she was very young. It's a great touch because it is a way to show what Liz used to be like, as well as a way to look beyond the unrelenting depression of the teens' outlook.

The author is so good at building that depressing world that a moment when that black fog lifts feels shoehorned in. Except for that, however, Falling into Place shows Zhang's adept strength at characterization and storytelling. This should not be her only work of fiction, but should be only the beginning.

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