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Reviewed by:
  • Before I Fall
  • Karen Coats
Oliver, Lauren. Before I Fall. HarperTeen, 2010 [480p]. ISBN 978-0-06-172680-4 $17.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 7-10

After a rough time in middle school, Sam ended up with a winning ticket in the mean-girl lottery when she was befriended by Lindsay, queen beyotch. Since then, Sam, Lindsay, Elody, and Ally have been the inseparable popular girls that other girls are too afraid to cross. On the night when Sam is scheduled to lose her virginity, the girls are together at a party as usual; when Sam's sex plans fall through, she leaves with the girls, only to be killed in an accident on the way home. The next morning, and every morning for the next seven days, she awakens on the same fateful Friday, reliving her last day. The structure of the book works remarkably well to create and sustain interest and speculation about Sam's ultimate fate: after [End Page 348] an attention-grabbing account of the accident, the first-person narration goes back to that morning, offering a compulsively readable, gossipy account of Sam's day and establishing the dynamics between the characters. As her day repeats itself, Sam moves from denial through reckless anger to regret and attempts at redemption; she begins to realize that someone else's life and death are entangled with her own, and that she must save the other girl even if she can't save herself. She also realizes how wrong she was about a certain boy that she left behind in her ascent to cool, and she manages a rocking break-up with her jerk boyfriend and a few precious, tender moments with the right boy even though it's unclear what the boys will ultimately remember. Oliver is unconcerned about establishing any sort of logic or worldview to support the repetition—Sam lives her last day over and over until she gets some things right, and she just knows when the real last day has come. Fortunately, that carelessness works, and readers will have no lasting questions even though they'll certainly feel a bit sad for the sweet boy left behind.

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