The
Fall of Lisa Bellow
by
Susan Perabo
Publication
Date: March 14th 2017
Publisher:
Simon & Schuster
Source: Publisher
Source: Publisher
Find
This Book: The Fall of Lisa Bellow
Rating:
3.5/5
Simon
& Schuster send my University professor review copies and ARC’s in exchange
for honest reviews and I was given a copy of this book by said professor for my
blog (he wasn’t interested in the genre and he knew I would be).
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 troubling mother's behavior/thoughts don’t bother you, then I would definitely recommend
this book!
