I first became interested in Lauren Oliver after hearing of all the good reviews her Delirium series has received. You may have noticed that I’ve a bit of a dystopian junkie (see here, here and here for some examples…), so naturally Oliver’s trilogy was high up on my to-read list. This was when I first noticed Before I Fall, a story about Sam, a popular high school girl with exciting friends and a wonderful boyfriend, who after attending a house party at her childhood best friend Kent McFuller’s house, dies in a car accident. She then gets stuck in a seemingly endless cycle of reliving her last day over and over again. What would you do if you knew that today was to be your last day on earth? Would you do anything differently?
I didn’t have particularly high hopes for this novel. I don’t know why, but I always find that books that focus on the themes of death and dying seem unable to live up to such a huge, poignant theme. But I was wrong, and this book completely blew me away.
Before I Fall is the most heartbreaking novel I have read in a long time. I was crying on and off throughout the entire book, and I was astounded by Oliver’s incredible talent of bringing me to tears with a single sentence.
“[he’s] the kind of guy who deserves the kind of girl who wears cashmere sweaters and is really good at crossword puzzles, or plays the violin, or volunteers at soup kitchens. Someone nice and normal and honest. The pain in my stomach intensifies, as though something’s caught in there, snapping away at my insides. I could never be good enough for him. Even if I lived the same day into infinity, I could never be good enough.”
During the first chapter I didn’t warm to Sam’s character at all, which is kind of the point. She is stuck-up, arrogant and at times downright cruel. She disregards her family and believes she is in love with her empty-headed jock boyfriend, even going as far as planning to lose her virginity to him that night. After she is killed and rewinds time to go through the motions of her last day again and again, the little details start to make themselves known to her. She begins to notice the cruel twist of her boyfriend’s sneer, the insecurities that lie deep within her best friend, the detail and love put into the Valentines note she receives from Kent, and the ghosts in the eyes of her lost classmate Juliet. Sam slowly discovers how she is capable of changing the lives of those around her, with only the smallest of gestures, but also discovers how some wounds are too deep to be healed.
I especially love the attention Oliver pays to her characters, as she slowly delves beneath the surface and builds them up as people in the reader’s minds. When you first meet a person, or make a new friend, everything about them is not on the surface for you to see. It takes time to discover their fears, hopes, dreams and desires. You learn bit by bit that they are flawed, and that that is what makes them whole. They are not character profiles, but people. Oliver truly turns her characters into people, especially with Lindsay, Kent and Sam. Their inner selves are revealed slowly, layer by layer.
This novel really made me question what I value in life, and how some things that I believed to be important perhaps aren’t important at all.
“I think about letting go – of the trees and the grass and sky and the red-streaked clouds on the horizon – letting it all drop away from me like a veil. Maybe there will be something spectacular underneath.”
Second Star To The Write 