A moody, multi-layered debut, Falling Into Place by Amy Zhang is a complex addition to contemporary YA fiction.
Only two people know that Liz Emerson was trying to die when she crashed her car on an icy turn after school. One of them is Liz herself, who’s life hangs in the balance after her “accident;” the other is the unusual, empathetic narrator of Falling Into Place by Amy Zhang.
The question of why Liz decided to die that day is the central subject of the novel, and is answered in memory-like loops and fragments over the course of Falling Into Place. Skipping across time, the story portrays Liz both as she appeared – a Queen Bee, a stereotypical partier, a mean girl – and as the smart, wounded girl who became caught up in her own vortex.
The novel also focuses on the others swept up in Liz’s vortex; her mother, her best friends, and various victims of her reign of terror in Meridian High School. The portrait that emerges – of Liz, her family, and her town – will be both familiar and unique to many readers, and will leave readers turning the pages to learn how this sad story ends.
‘Falling Into Place’ review
As delicately written as it is brutally told, Falling Into Place spares none of its characters from the penetrating gaze of its clever (if somewhat underutilized) narrator. The story of Liz Emerson’s potentially fatal car crash is both broader and more intimate than it initially seems; the story of one person, as Zhang skillfully illustrates, is really the story of everyone around her.
Contradictions – emotional, physical, and even scientific – are a running theme in Falling Into Place. Liz Emerson’s life is perfect and a wreck, her friends adore and despise her, and no one has any idea what the most popular girl in Meridian High is really like. The novel is also a contrast to itself; neatly queued plot-points and character connections suggest an order behind the chaotic mess of life that provides a satisfying framework for a much more complicated reality.
But though the karma of equal and opposite reactions is a heavy thread through Falling Into Place, the emotions of its characters are never simplistic. Zhang uses the labeling language of high school as a jumping-off point for depth and understanding. Everyone here has a childhood, a fragment of innocence which – as Liz has forgotten – preserves the possibility of redemption for even the cruelest characters.
It speaks especially well of Falling Into Place that the novel never reads like an “issue” book. Though Zhang’s characters see both sides of familiar problems like suicide, bullying, addiction, and teen pregnancy, they are contextualized by Liz’s tragic perspective. By projecting these issues through the whirlwind of her complicated protagonist’s regret and self-loathing, Zhang neatly sidesteps the tropes of an after school special, and keeps the issues faced by her characters grounded in muddy reality.
By turns sweet and vicious, steady and rattling, Falling Into Place is a worthy new entry in the contemporary fold of YA fiction. The enigmatic Liz will demand disgust and sympathy in equal measure, and keep readers turning the pages for the next clue in this rock-solid debut.
Falling Into Place is available today from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and your local independent bookstore. You can also check out our interview with author Amy Zhang here.
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