I just finished another one of the books in my ILL pile. It's the first book I've read by author Lauren Oliver, and the movie was just released earlier this month, so I read it in the nick of time.
Before I Fall is kind of a weird mash-up of Mean Girls and Groundhog Day and the YA novel If I Stay.
Samantha Kingston, called Sam, is a popular, pretty high-school senior. She's not the Queen Bee, that's her BFF Lindsay, but she's definitely elite. The last day of her life, isn't what she thought it'd be: a montage of all the greatest moments, but instead is like a play that's being shown again and again and again. When she wakes up after the accident, she relives that day over and over again. She already knows her lines, and she knows what other people are going to say and do, but by making different choices, she hopes that she can change fate.
Throughout her days of re-living, the reader gets glimpses into her life before she was highschool royalty, and also into the most secretive and intimate parts of her friends' lives.
The story is well-written in that we see real character growth in Sam as she watches herself interact with all the people in her life that she took for granted, and we learn the back-stories of all these peripheral characters that she thought she had figured out (because teenagers have everything figured out, you know).
Now I'm going to have to watch the film so I can write a compare/contrast blog.
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