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Susan Perabo

Author of The Fall of Lisa Bellow

7+ Works 353 Members 27 Reviews 2 Favorited

About the Author

Susan Perabo teaches creative writing at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

Includes the name: Susan Perabo

Image credit: Photograph by A. Pierce Bounds

Works by Susan Perabo

Associated Works

The Best American Short Stories 1996 (1996) — Contributor — 246 copies
2011 Pushcart Prize XXXV: Best of the Small Presses (2010) — Contributor — 39 copies
New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 1995 (1995) — Contributor — 34 copies
New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 1996 (1996) — Contributor — 31 copies
New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 1992 (1992) — Contributor — 22 copies
Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good (2015) — Introduction — 10 copies

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Reviews

3.5 Stars--rounded down.

Meredith Oliver and Lisa Bellow are 13 year old girls. They attend school together, but they are part of different groups, and Meredith understands that her group is eclipsed by Lisa’s group. They are the cool girls, and Lisa is the coolest girl of all. But fate flings them into a situation in which they are both at risk, and Meredith walks away, while Lisa does not.

How do you deal with being the survivor of a disaster? What if the person who does not survive is not someone you liked? What if she is someone you might have wished harm upon in your secret daydreams. Particularly, how do you deal with that if you are thirteen?

That is the main story line of this novel, but there are several sidebars which are just as, if not more, interesting. Perabo is an able painter of characters, and I particularly liked Evan, Meredith’s older brother. His story was the one that touched me the most and seemed the most realistic. I could have been persuaded to give this a slightly higher rating if Claire, the mother, had been as real. I found her to be incomprehensible, actually. Unlikable in every way, and clueless about how to care for a traumatized child.

This book is admittedly outside the genres that I generally enjoy, but it did certainly hold my interest and propel me forward right to the end. There were questions I would have liked to have answered, but for the most part those were not germane to making the story whole, and some of the threads were obviously there to heighten the suspense surrounding the mystery. If you are a fan of this type of book, this one would no doubt be a good one to read. Susan Perabo is a good writer and spins a good tale.

I received a copy of The Fall of Lisa Bellow from NetGalley in return for an honest review. My thanks to Simon and Shuster and Susan Perabo for this opportunity.










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mattorsara | 20 other reviews | Aug 11, 2022 |
My english professor gets sent free review copies of books from Simon & Schuster and I was given an arc of this to take off his hands back in February. Haven't finished it yet but it's certainly been an interesting perspective so far to tell the story from the POV of the girl not kidnapped.

***This review and more can be found at Love at First Write***

UPDATE:
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 problematic parenting don’t bother you then I would definitely recommend this book!
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Nikki_Sojkowski | 20 other reviews | Aug 26, 2021 |
I received a copy of this book free from the publisher via netgalley.com in exchange for an honest review.

Full reviews available at www.coffeeandtrainspotting.wordpress.com.
 
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SarahRita | 20 other reviews | Aug 11, 2021 |
I had never heard of Susan Perabo before my friend bought this book (although I do imagine her as looking something like Piper Perabo). My friend bought this book at a bookstore while we were out. Of course, the first thing that happened when we got back to the car was I had to go through all her books and see what she bought. This one jumped out at me. Maybe it was the cute little dog sitting in the car. I don't know. I started reading the first short story in the collection, "Thick as Thieves" and was hooked. I ended up taking the book home and reading it first. I found this collection of stories to be very moving and relevant to me (even the very odd and slightly off-kilter stories). Perabo's writing drew me in and kept me reading. I would finish one story and move directly to the next. I just really enjoyed these stories and found them to be gems every one. I need my own copy of this book!… (more)
 
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melrailey | Apr 7, 2020 |

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