Susan Perabo - The Fall Of Lisa Bellow

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Not for me

I didn't get on with this book at all.  It's supposed to be a profound and searching study of trauma and survivor guilt, but I'm afraid I just found it extremely long-winded, turgid, unconvincing and, frankly, very dull.

The story is of Meredith an ordinary-ish girl who is, like many others, despised and mocked by the bitchy "Popular" clique in her school, led by the eponymous Lisa Bellow.  When something finally actually happens, Meredith and the eponymous Lisa find themselves caught in a robbery.  The armed robber takes Lisa with him but leaves Meredith behind, and the remainder of the book deals with the psychological effects on Meredith and her family.

Susan Perabo does this through long, minute detailing of the internal monologues and feelings of both Meredith and her mother.  This can be a very effective device, but although Perabo writes very good prose, I found the whole thing quite staggeringly tedious.  I didn't find either character very convincing and I thought there was little new or fresh in what was being said.  The structure didn't help; suddenly leaving Meredith's experience for extended flashbacks into her mother's psychological past, for example, was just annoying, especially as I didn't really care about it, and other oh-so-artfully placed flashbacks to leave little cliffhangers were just as irritating.

I got more and more bored and frustrated and eventually I couldn't face any more.  I should have been really interested in Meredith's internal state but, for example, when she went to the mall to buy shoes and the self-examination kept on and on and on, I found myself muttering, "How much *more* of this?"  I very rarely do this when reading a book which I have been sent for review, but around half way through I simply couldn't face any more and gave up.  As Meredith's mother would probably have said (many times), words cannot express the sense of relief I felt.

Holly Bourne's brilliant Am I Normal Yet?, the stunning My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent and others have, in different ways, taken me right inside a teenage girl's head and completely gripped me.  This completely failed to do either for me.  I have given this two stars rather than one because it is written in good prose, but although other readers have plainly enjoyed it, I really, really didn't.

(I received an ARC from NetGalley.)