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Susan Perabo

The Fall Of Lisa Bellow Paperback – 1 March 2017

by Susan Perabo (Author)

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Paperback, 1 March 2017

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WHAT HAPPENS TO THE GIRL LEFT BEHIND?

A masked man with a gun enters a sandwich shop in broad daylight, and Meredith Oliver suddenly finds herself ordered to the filthy floor, where she cowers face to face with her nemesis, Lisa Bellow, the most popular girl in her eighth grade class. The minutes tick inexorably by, and Meredith lurches between comforting the sobbing Lisa and imagining her own impending death. Then the man orders Lisa Bellow to stand and come with him, leaving Meredith behind.

After Lisa’s abduction, Meredith spends most days in her room. As the community stages vigils and searches, Claire, Meredith’s mother, is torn between relief that her daughter is alive and helplessness over her inability to protect or even comfort her child. Her daughter is here, but not. How can life ever move forward again?

The Fall of Lisa Bellow is edgy and original, a hair-raising exploration of the ripple effects of an unthinkable crime, for readers who enjoyed Everything I Never Told You and Room.

Praise for Susan Perabo's short stories:

‘Explores the very human question - in surprising and original ways - of what it really means to be afraid’ Elizabeth Strout, bestselling author of My Name is LucyBarton on The Broken Places

‘Darkly beautiful stories about love and loss and every gradation between. Each one is suffused with astonishing wit and tenderness. Well worth the wait!’ Jenny Offill, New York Times bestselling author of Dept. of Speculation on Who I Was Supposed to Be

‘There's only one way to read Susan Perabo, and that's breathlessly. Each story in Who I Was Supposed to Be crackles with narrative electricity, and every one made me want to stand and cheer’ Richard Russo

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Product details

Publisher : Simon & Schuster UK; Export edition (1 March 2017)
Language : English
Paperback : 352 pages
ISBN-10 : 1471163415
ISBN-13 : 978-1471163418
Dimensions : 15.3 x 2.15 x 23.4 cm

Customer Reviews:
28 ratings

Product description

About the Author

Susan Perabo is the author of the collections of short stories, Who I Was Supposed to Be and Why They Run the Way They Do, and the novels The Broken Places and The Fall of Lisa Bellow. Her fiction has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, and New Stories from the South, and has appeared in numerous magazines, including One Story, Glimmer Train, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, and The Sun. She is Writer in Residence and professor of English at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and on the faculty of the low-residency MFA Program at Queens University. She holds an MFA from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.

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Top reviews from Australia

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A mystery that's more about the girl that's left behind than 'whodunnit'

Reviewed in Australia on 24 March 2017

This book should have disappointed me. But it most certainly didn’t.

After I finished reading it I checked out some of the reviews on Goodreads, which is something I never do before I’ve written my own… lest I be swayed, second-guess myself or inadvertently let others’ words seep into my head.

And there were a few negative comments from those expecting a whodunnit of sorts. But… this isn’t one of those books. And I didn’t mind.

And indeed, it’s more about the ‘fallout’ of the event than the event itself. We meet Meredith just before the robbery and abduction so get some insight into the 13yr old. And she’s delightful. We spend the book in her head as well as her mother’s but are privy to the changes and impacts the event also have on Meredith’s older brother Evan – who recently endured his own life-changing experience; and father Mark.

There are a number of themes in this book and the one that hit home (for me) centred around family and relationships. It pops up early in the book as Claire reflects on something that occurred a decade earlier.

And then there’s Claire’s relationship with Mark, her husband. She loves him, but they’re very different.

I was reminded that kids are smarter than we give them credit for. They can see beyond the façade and both Evan and Meredith recognise the respective roles their parents play, even if they don’t acknowledge it.

This is not a novel of suspense. Or a mystery. It’s a study in human nature. It’s about love, relationships, families, fate and resilience. I very much appreciated the ‘journey’ (#sorrynotsorry) Perabo takes us on, and where she ultimately leaves us.

Helpful

Both Suspenseful and Psychologically Acute

Reviewed in Australia on 14 March 2017

One day 13-year-old Meredith runs into her arch-rival at the deli--only instead of cutting each other dead, both girls find themselves lying next to each other on the floor as the deli is robbed at gunpoint. What follows is Meredith's attempts to make sense of what happened, and her parents' struggles to relate to a daughter who is not only in the throes of puberty, but is also processing--or not--a traumatic event that has changed not just her perception of herself but, maybe even more significantly for a girl her age, her social standing in school.

"The Fall of Lisa Bellow" is both a suspense story and an examination of the internal pressures working on an ordinary middle-class American family with two children going through the changes of adolescence. As a suspense story it keeps the tension high, teasing the reader through Meredith's semi-hallucinatory recollections of the robbery and kidnapping and her confused fantasies about it afterwards. It is not, however, a conventional thriller in that the ending is not wrapped up neatly, instead opting for life-like loose ends.

It is in the interactions between the characters as they negotiate their day-to-day problems, though, that the novel truly shines. All the characters are rendered in the 3D, and the point of view switches back and forth between Meredith and her mother, so that the reader is given both Meredith's confused and resentful teenage rebellion, and her mother's fear and frustration as she is faced with a daughter she no longer knows, and a growing sense of her own inadequacies. There are no easy answers or trite resolutions, but there is a rich and multi-faceted examination of comfortable ordinary lives as they attempt to deal with a brush with random tragedy.

My thanks to NetGalley for providing an ARC of this book. All opinions are my own.

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‘Why? Why would a robber become a kidnapper?’

Reviewed in Australia on 15 March 2017

Two eighth-grade girls witness an armed robbery in a sandwich shop. One of the girls is kidnapped by the robber, the other girl is left behind. Why? Meredith Oliver is the girl left behind, and while she figures that Lisa Bellow was taken because she weighed less and was prettier and more popular, she really can’t move past Lisa’s abduction. What if they’d both been abducted? What if Lisa knew her abductor?

The Oliver family has had a traumatic year. Meredith’s older brother, Evan, a high school baseball star, had his left eye and eye socket crushed by a foul ball. He is still coming to terms with his injury, still trying to adjust. Meredith’s parents, Mark and Claire, are dentists who share a practice. This novel is about how the Oliver family deal with these events, from the perspectives of Meredith and Claire.

‘Grief and hope were cruel bedfellows, incompatible.’

Claire wants to protect her children; Mark realises that they need space. Meredith becomes obsessed with Lisa’s disappearance; Evan works on his own dreams. And what about Lisa Bellow’s mother? Can the Oliver family survive? How?

Reading this novel was like being an observer, unable to intervene in any meaningful way, in another family’s crisis. I felt for Meredith, as she moves between relief at being left behind and guilt at surviving. I could understand her freezing as the impact of events hit her, and then rebelling. How do parents handle this effectively, without adding to the trauma already experienced or alienating the child? But what about Lisa? I wanted answers which Ms Perabo has chosen not to give.

Did I enjoy this novel? No. Would I read more novels by this author? Absolutely. In this novel, Ms Perabo raises a number of uncomfortable issues, creates less than perfect (and completely human) characters. By focussing this novel on Meredith and her experiences, Ms Perabo reminds us that trauma is varied and complex and that sometimes, even in fiction, there are no satisfactory answers.

Note: My thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster (Australia) for providing me with a free electronic copy of this book for review purposes.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

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Top reviews from other countries

cynthia woodward

Wow, what a story

Reviewed in Canada on 4 May 2017

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This book is so raw, and real and true, you feel like you are there, with the family, with the girls during the incident and surviving after like all of the characters present. It is incredibly written , conversations are so vivid and moods and feelings amazingly conveyed. I couldn't put it down as I turned each page feeling compelled to read on.

chella

Some of the most relatable characterization I have ever read ...

Reviewed in the United States on 3 April 2017

Verified Purchase

Some of the most relatable characterization I have ever read. I actually gasped after the first paragraph because it just felt so startlingly familiar.

3 people found this helpful

NBS

A must read

Reviewed in the United States on 7 August 2017

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This is the kind of book that sticks with you. The prose is both down-to-earth and provocative. Meredith's voice is so spot on that you wonder if the author consulted a middle schooler's diary for quotes.
The subject matter is heavy. Perabo writes, "Things happened. Things you couldn’t believe. Things that couldn’t be explained. Inconceivable things. They happened." This book addresses the question: what do you do when the worst thing you can imagine happens...to the person sitting next to you?
Still, the novel is enjoyable. It's funny at times and was a complete joy to read. Loved it. 5 stars. Read it.

2 people found this helpful

Janice A Palazzolo

Not great

Reviewed in the United States on 22 April 2017

Verified Purchase

I got really impatient with the moms, both of them. I can't even remember their names. I would have liked to learn more about what happened to Lisa and less about what the other girl, I can't remember her name, was imagining.

One person found this helpful

Donna J. Murphy

Doesn't have to be a happy end but some kind of end

Reviewed in the United States on 15 May 2017

Verified Purchase

A bit disturbing but I'm sure that's what Perabo was going for. I prefer an end to a journey. Doesn't have to be a happy end but some kind of end. This book stayed with me awhile.

2 people found this helpful

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The Fall Of Lisa Bellow Paperback – 1 March 2017

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