Chapter by Chapter

I’ve gotta admit that when I read the opening sentence to author Amy Zhang’s Falling Into Place, I was a bit skeptical about how much I would like the novel. It starts out stating one of Newton’s Laws of Physics and (like most teenagers) physics is something you usually aren’t very excited about. Regardless, I swallowed down my fear of the equation f=ma and continued reading. I can tell you that Falling Into Place is a lot more than what meets the eye. This is a beautifully written contemporary read that I got addicted to instantly.

Falling Into Place is all about Liz Emerson. She’s beautiful. She’s perfect. She’s her school’s golden girl. Everybody knows her name, nobody wants to get in her way. So when Liz attempts suicide by driving her car off the road everybody is shocked. The boy who secretly loves her, her mother, her best friends and her peers—nobody can begin to understand why Liz would ever want to end her life. Not even Liz herself really understands why she wants to die. But with her life hanging in the balance it becomes evident that there is always more to a person than what meets the eye.

I’ve never read anything close to Falling Into Place. Yes, I’ve read contemporary in the past and yes, I’ve read some novels that were pretty to read—but Falling Into place felt like whole new territory. There have been tons of novels where the main plot revolves around a protagonist who is, for all intents and purposes, an antagonist. Liz Emerson is exactly that. Liz is a horrible person. But why is she the way she is today? What drove her to try and take her own life? Those are the questions that every page of Falling Into Place tries to answer.

That being said, Falling Into Place is a novel that is essentially about how a bully becomes a bully. It isn’t all about how Liz was a person who was mean at times and made mistakes that impacted those around her, but it’s about a vicious cycle that she was pulled into. Every little choice made by Liz changed her future and the futures of the people around her. Told with multiple points of view, we see exactly what Liz’s choices have done to almost everybody she has come in contact with.

The characters in Falling Into Place are realistic. Teenage readers are going to love the cast that Zhang’s pulled together for her novel. Considering that the novel is about an overall bleak topic, its refreshing to see how she manages to place bits of comedy and light through flashbacks and her characters. Readers are going to enjoy a realistic story with realistic characters acting in realistic ways.

Zhang’s writing is beautiful. That’s part of what had me so addicted to Falling Into Place. I finished it in one sitting and had no regrets. I smiled at some portions of the novels and boy, oh boy, did I cry. Everything about Zhang’s writing is lyrical. It’s beautiful. It takes strong writing to make me burst out into tears while reading—but she captures Liz’s slow-building misery correctly and she manages to put it into words that work perfectly.

 I would recommend Falling Into Place to readers who are fans of YA contemp. Any readers who are looking for an emotional read that isn’t based so much around plot as it is about life should give Falling Into Place a shot. Readers who want a novel that is beautifully written in prose and want a bit of wetness added to their eyes should also be giving Falling Into Place a look.