Susan Perabo

In The Fall of Lisa Bellow a young girl, Lisa, is abducted from a local sandwich shop, another, Meredith, is left behind. What follows is not the standard suspense book about the search for a missing teen, but an examination of the life of a suburban family and in particular, that of the girl who remains.

Mark and Claire Oliver are dentists. They have consciously chosen careers and a life that will offer them the least amount of inconvenience and worry. Son Evan’s tragic accident on the show more baseball field has marred their picture-perfect life. Now they must deal with daughter Meredith’s terrifying experience. It threatens to topple their happy home. This is the main focus of the novel.

Having taught middle school English, when it comes to the behaviors of Lisa, Meredith and their friends, I can say Ms. Perabo knows her subject. In addition, the description of the middle school cliques made me inwardly cringe as I remember my own days, suffering through lunch hour, gym class, and those hours when I wasn’t safely cocooned in my room, away from the scrutiny of those deemed more popular than I. And as reprehensible as Claire Oliver’s reactions may be towards Evan’s preschool bullying and Meredith’s unpopularity, I as a mother understand.

The Fall of Lisa Bellow is an excellently crafted and sensitive book that examines the human emotions and reactions to a tragedy and its far-reaching effects. show less

This book. I liked it a lot. I was I liked it a lot. I'm generally not a fan of open-ended novels and usually find books that are intentionally ambiguous. I usually stick pretty firmly to the idea that if an author starts a story they better damn well finish it and if they are going to start a novel it should probably have some sort of point and the books that don't usually fall somewhere between obnoxious and pretentious. Obviously that is me broadly stereotyping but stereotypes exist for a show more reason and they don't deny the existence of outliers. "The Fall of Lisa Bellow" is an outlier. It is vague, and open-ended, and it doesn't tell a story so much as it stops in and watches one family and paints a portrait of a family living in the wake of two very different life altering traumas experienced by each of their children. This novel was a very quick read and written in a tone that is both haunting in it's simplistic while observing how complex it is to be human. How hard it is for a mother who's instinct is to fiercely protect her children only to have life show her how little say she has in the matter. A teenage girl who witnesses something extraordinarily awful happen to someone she didn't like on a very basic normal teenage level. The inner murkiness that results from guilt, guilt from being the one left behind, not knowing what to do with the hate she always had for her school's most popular, shallow, "mean girl" and the fact that the last thing she ever heard and saw that mean girl do was say words of kindness and attempt to give comfort. A brother/son trying to balance surviving his own traumatic freak occurrence while helping a little sister try to get through hers. A father who desperately wants to be able to make everything better with presents, hope, and optimism. "The Fall of Lisa Bellow" doesn't provide much in the way of neatly tied up ends but shows a beautiful example of human resilience and determination to move forward through life even if it's by way of a convoluted path. show less

An insightful and sometimes uncanny story about relationships, trauma, and the darkest corners of our secret selves.

(Full disclosure: I received a free electronic ARC for review through NetGalley. Trigger warning for rape.)

There were still little green ribbons covering Lisa’s locker, but every morning some would have fallen down overnight, scattered like tiny leaves, and she would pick them up and toss them into the bottom of her own locker. How long would they let that locker, 64C, sit show more there, unused? How long did missing-person ribbons stay up? Was there an expiration date, some point where they officially became irrelevant, a day when the fall of Lisa Bellow became the winter of someone else, as Evan had predicted from the start?

###

“You’re popular,” Jules said. “I can’t believe it. Of all of us, I didn’t think it would be you first.”

###

Maybe they were all bitches, Claire thought. Maybe that was all there was to be in eighth grade. Maybe you didn’t have any choice. Maybe your only choice was figuring out what kind of bitch you wanted to be.

###

One crisp October afternoon, thirteen-year-old Meredith Oliver stops by the Deli Barn on the way home from school, to treat herself to a root beer soda for a job well done on her algebra test. Ahead of her in line stands her arch nemesis, Parkway North Middle School's resident Mean Girl, Lisa Bellow. Her presence so unnerves Meredith that she almost turned tail and ran - that is, until Lisa caught her eye through the door. She couldn't show Lisa any weakness, not with so much at stake.

As the sandwich farmer* is taking Lisa's order (overly complicated, natch), a masked man strides in and robs the cashier at gunpoint. He forces Meredith and Lisa to lay down on the sticky floor of the restaurant while he walks the cashier to the back of the store, in search of a safe that doesn't exist. When he comes back - alone - he forces Lisa to her feet and leaves with her. Traumatized, Meredith stays on the floor for another eleven minutes ("eleven glorious minutes"), until another customer walks in and find her. Even then, it takes a group of paramedics and "a needle full of Thorazine to peel her from her cherished spot."

The Fall of Lisa Bellow is a strange and wonderful book. It's about how Meredith copes with the trauma of the robbery and kidnapping, yes; but hers is not the only trauma we bear witness to. Meredith's mother, Claire; her seventeen-year-old brother Ethan; Lisa's mother Colleen; and Lisa's friends Becca, Abby, and Amanda - all of them are working through their own "stuff," not all of it related to Lisa's disappearance. Yet the ripples of her kidnapping and likely murder reverberate through all their lives.

Above all else, though, this is a story about relationships: between parents and children; friends and enemies; in-groups and out-groups. Perabo's writing is keen and insightful, often times cuttingly so: I found that both the child and the adult in me could relate to Meredith and Claire's inner monologues like whoah. When Meredith laments that

"It had been all downhill since fifth grade. Sometimes she looked back on that golden year and felt a pang of nostalgia so keenly that she thought she might actually die."

my stomach actually twisted in sympathy and recognition, albeit for slightly different reasons. (My school district's lines were redrawn in the summer between fifth and sixth grade, and I had to finish out my elementary education at a different school than my friends. I also got glasses, braces, and my period that year. It was literal hell, and nothing was the same after.)

Perabo isn't afraid to explore the darker, uglier corners of our secret selves, and the result is often uncomfortable - but also deeply satisfying. When Claire admitted to Mark that she deliberately hurt Evan's bully when she found him sitting in her chair - "Rewind, she thought. Rewind. She actually almost prayed this word: rewind." - I nearly squealed with shared horror and regret. Like, the panic was palpable, a thing I could hold in my hand and caress.

While the first half of the story feels like a contemporary, firmly rooted in reality, there's a weird, M. Night Shyamalan-esque twist halfway through that cleaves the story in two. You're left trying to distinguish reality from fantasy. Normally, this wondering can come to dominate a story (this isn't a complaint, just an observation), yet this isn't the case with The Fall of Lisa Bellow: Perabo's writing is so masterful that you still see the forest for the trees. It's the little details, not to mention the painfully believable dialogue, that make this story sing - and scream.

That said, I wasn't completely satisfied with the resolution, which felt a little rushed and ... maybe a bit of a bait and switch?

Nevertheless, I'd definitely read it again, if given a do-over: Perabo's psychological insights are 110% worth it.

* I love this term so much, I just had to sneak it into the review. No regrets.

http://www.easyvegan.info/2017/03/15/the-fall-of-lisa-bellow-by-susan-perabo/ show less

The Fall of Lisa Bellow by Susan Perabo is a highly recommended complex family drama about survivor's guilt.

Meredith Oliver is thirteen and in the eighth grade. She and her friends watch and discuss the popular mean girls at their school, including Lisa Bellows, whose locker is next to Meredith's. It is a struggle for anyone to get through the day when in middle school. Meredith's family is still recovering from the horrible accident her adored older brother had when playing baseball. Now show more he's essentially blind in one eye. All Meredith wants to do is get through this day in October and stop to get a root beer at the Deli Barn after school.

When Meredith gets to the Deli Barn, she sees that Lisa Bellows is already there, so she has to wait for Lisa to order her two sandwiches. Suddenly a masked gun man enters the sandwich shop. He orders both girls to get on the floor and robs the place. The two girls cower together on the floor, alternately giving each other support. Before the gun man leaves he tells Lisa to get up and come with him. Meredith remains on the floor, completely paralyzed with fear, until a customer comes in, a janitor at her school, and calls the police. Meredith is traumatized, trying to deal with witnessing the kidnapping, being the girl left behind, and processing all her feeling about the event.

The narrative has chapters alternating between two characters, following the thoughts and emotions of Meredith and Claire Oliver, her mother. While Meredith is trying to understand why she was the one left behind and find some answers, if only in her head. Claire is relieved her daughter was not taken, but struggles with confronting her inability to protect her children or even comfort them.

The Fall of Lisa Bellow is a very well-written book and was compelling enough that, staying up a bit too late, I read it in one sitting. I simply had to find out what happened. Perabo manages to capture and realistically portray the inner voice and struggles of both a thirteen-year old girl and her mother. This is a feat in itself. Both Meredith and Claire are strong characters who are dealing with their unspeakable mental anguish in their own way. They are also both well developed characters and strikingly realistic - neither of them are particularly likable. The depiction of Meredith struggling with survivor's guilt and trying to process what happened is especially effective.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Simon & Schuster.
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2017/03/the-fall-of-lisa-bellow.html
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