3.5 Stars--rounded down.

Meredith Oliver and Lisa Bellow are 13 year old girls. They attend school together, but they are part of different groups, and Meredith understands that her group is eclipsed by Lisa’s group. They are the cool girls, and Lisa is the coolest girl of all. But fate flings them into a situation in which they are both at risk, and Meredith walks away, while Lisa does not.

How do you deal with being the survivor of a disaster? What if the person who does not survive is not someone you liked? What if she is someone you might have wished harm upon in your secret daydreams. Particularly, how do you deal with that if you are thirteen?

That is the main story line of this novel, but there are several sidebars which are just as, if not more, interesting. Perabo is an able painter of characters, and I particularly liked Evan, Meredith’s older brother. His story was the one that touched me the most and seemed the most realistic. I could have been persuaded to give this a slightly higher rating if Claire, the mother, had been as real. I found her to be incomprehensible, actually. Unlikable in every way, and clueless about how to care for a traumatized child.

This book is admittedly outside the genres that I generally enjoy, but it did certainly hold my interest and propel me forward right to the end. There were questions I would have liked to have answered, but for the most part those were not germane to making the story whole, and some of the threads were obviously there to heighten the suspense surrounding the mystery. If you are a fan of this type of book, this one would no doubt be a good one to read. Susan Perabo is a good writer and spins a good tale.

I received a copy of The Fall of Lisa Bellow from NetGalley in return for an honest review. My thanks to Simon and Shuster and Susan Perabo for this opportunity.










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My english professor gets sent free review copies of books from Simon & Schuster and I was given an arc of this to take off his hands back in February. Haven't finished it yet but it's certainly been an interesting perspective so far to tell the story from the POV of the girl not kidnapped.

***This review and more can be found at Love at First Write***

UPDATE:
My adventure with Meredith, her mom, and the Lisa of Meredith’s imagination has come to a close and I’m still not quite sure what I think. It was very cool to read a book without any action in it. By that I mean the baseball injury happened before the events of the story and the kidnapping/robbery were told by the girl who wasn’t kidnapped. Of course there was drama in the wake of this tragedy, but the ‘action’ of being kidnapped, of being locked in the bathroom, were all the imagination of Meredith the girl who survived. It was more of a psychologically cool book with Meredith’s thoughts, her interactions with the rest of the eight grade class, Lisa’s lonely mother, and the morbid thoughts of Meredith’s mom.

One thing I wasn’t a fan of was the incessant, unnecessary slut shaming coming from all perspectives. I can maybe understand it coming from the ignorant perspective of an eighth-grader, but from her mother too? Obviously people aren’t perfect and characters should be flawed, but this was problematic to the point of being extremely uncomfortable to read. I’m already reading about a girl getting kidnapped and presumably raped, that’s the sort of uncomfortableness I signed up for with picking up this novel. The loneliness of Lisa’s mother only cranked up the uncomfortable vibes form this book. The unnecessary slut shaming from a mother who should know better was going too far for me and that alone took away a star.

Claire (Meredith’s mother) was also incredibly morbid and pessimistic throughout the whole book. I get not being smiley and cheerful, but I really can’t understand her mental state of her children being gone and giving up on them when they are still living in her house and are clearly struggling. That’s when families support each other, like with the husband trying to help the son get back into baseball after his surgeries. Clearly the kid won’t be getting any athletic scholarships, but if he wants to try to play baseball again with his buddies, for a club, or for the high school team again, let him try and discover failure on his own if it comes down to that. She was also super judgmental about Meredith’s choice of friends which I thought was weird?

One thing I really enjoyed was how the novel ended. Meredith brought a sort of finality to it, but also one of starting over- without Lisa. I just assumed that the story was going to go through how horrible the experience was and then last minute Lisa would be found (dead or alive but I assumed alive). Instead we got this incredible realistic, sad but realistic, ending where Lisa stays missing. She disappears from the news and she will probably never be found. The book discusses how the miracles are always the ones talked about, the girls found years after everyone had given up hope. It was eye-opening to be given a story without that hope and acknowledging that grief and movement towards closer was also ok.

All in all this book had two things I found largely problematic, as delineated above, but it also gave me a new perspective and was pretty well-written. If the slut-shaming and problematic parenting don’t bother you then I would definitely recommend this book!
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I received a copy of this book free from the publisher via netgalley.com in exchange for an honest review.

Full reviews available at www.coffeeandtrainspotting.wordpress.com. ( )

The Fall of Lisa Bellow by Susan Perabo is a family drama that delves into the aftereffects of a traumatic event.

Meredith Oliver and Lisa Bellows are classmates but that is about all they have in common until a fateful day in a local deli. An armed gunman robs the deli then inexplicably kidnaps Lisa, leaving Meredith to try to understand why she was left behind and try to cope with the lingering trauma. This life-altering event also reverberates throughout the Oliver family and the rest of the community with very different reactions from many of people whose lives are touched by the tragedy. Lisa's mom Colleen is lost and desperate for answers about her daughter. The incident seems to have an adverse effect on Meredith's mom Claire, who grows increasingly dissatisfied with her life. Meredith's older brother Evan finally snaps out of the depression that has plagued him since a baseball accident months earlier irrevocably changed his life. Meredith is understandably distraught about the events that transpired in the deli and she becomes obsessed with Lisa and what happened to her after the kidnapping.

Until that day in the deli, Meredith is a typical eighth grader who is fairly average in just about every way. After Lisa's kidnapping, she gains a certain notoriety at school and quickly becomes part of Lisa's circle of friends. Meredith is present in the physical sense, but emotionally, she is just sort of drifting away. She builds a rather elaborate fantasy about what is happening to Lisa and her imaginings soon take on a life of their own.

Meredith's mother Claire is not a particularly likable or sympathetic character. She has sort of coasted into the life she has and her musings do not paint her in a flattering light at all. She is somewhat self-centered and rather unkind in her reflections about her husband, her chosen career and to some degree, her children.

On the other hand, Meredith's brother Evan and her father Mark are kind-hearted and quite likable. Mark is unceasingly upbeat and cheerful and although he sometimes looks at life through rose-colored glasses, his heart is always in the right place. Evan has been through a difficult ordeal but he is finally finding his way back. Despite the four year age difference between them, the siblings are rather close and Evan makes a concerted effort to draw Meredith back into the family's day to day life.

The Fall of Lisa Bellow by Susan Perabo is a character-driven novel that is somewhat slow paced and very introspective. The plot is certainly imaginative but a little disjointed with no clear resolutions to many of the story arcs. All in all, an interesting story that has very little suspense and leaves a lot of unanswered questions. ( )

I loved the story and the character development. I felt like I was being taken for a ride going in different directions at the same time ( )