The Way We Fall (review)

Sixteen-year-old Kaelyn is hoping to reinvent herself as an outgoing social butterfly for her junior year, but her plans are abruptly put on hold when an unidentified virus strikes her Canadian island town, forcing the closure of schools and businesses. As the illness rapidly spreads and the mortality rate of those infected reaches one hundred percent, the government decides to quarantine the island, leaving Kaelyn and her neighbors to fend for themselves while scientists work towards an elusive cure. Isolated, residents divide into two groups: those that see survival as a joint effort band together to start food and medication drives, while those of the everyman-for-himself mindset start looting and killing anyone showing the slightest symptom. After her mother dies and her uncle is shot, Kaelyn struggles to keep her young cousin safe from both the virus and the roaming gangs, until she herself becomes ill. Told in Kaelyn's letters to her former best friend, the book offers a compellingly tight focus, relating the town's descent into chaos with heartbreakingly vivid details ranging from the echoing loneliness of an empty toy store to Kaelyn's bloody discovery of the corpses of a mother and child. The inclusion of more quotidian elements, such as Kaelyn's emerging romance with a local boy and her reconciliation with a former foe, make the survival story even more harrowing and recall the tone of Rosoff 's How I Live Now (BCCB 9/04) and Pfeffer's Life as We Knew It (BCCB 12/06). Crewe's dystopia, however, is even bleaker, as nearly everyone Kaelyn cares about is dead or missing by the book's close. A promised sequel offers a glimpse of hope, but meanwhile, readers may find themselves purchasing more hand sanitizer this flu season.