Review : The Way we Fall

Posted by kay on March 29, 2012 12:02 pm in 4 stars reads | 5 comments

The Way we Fall by Megan Crewe
Pages : 309
Genre : YA, Speculative fiction
Series : Fallen World, Book 1
My Rating :

What it’s about :

It starts like an unpleasant cold, but it quickly grows into something more: a deadly virus quickly spreading through Kaelyn’s small community, forcing the government to quarantine the island. Kaelyn wants only one thing : keep herself and her family safe and healthy, a task that gets harder and harder when food gets rare and there are more dead than alive…

My Thoughts :

The Way we Fall certainly doesn’t follow the current YA trend of futuristic, dystopian novels. Instead, it offers a terrifying and realistic novel of speculative fiction, in the same vein as  The Things that Keep us Here or In a Perfect World. The threat of a deadly virus outbreak is something that is easy to imagine in the present, and if you remember the panic that surrounded the H1N1 situation a few years ago, you’ll understand how scary this possibility is.

The first thing I thought of when I started reading The Way we Fall was the movie Contagion, a movie I did appreciate. But while the two do share similar themes, The Way we Fall is a much quieter story, following a regular teen girl with her own worries and insecurities rather than a complete cast of characters. And since the narration is done through Kaelyn’s letters in a journal destined to her former best friend, the view we get is intimate, narrow, and sometimes limited in terms of context or scientific information.

I thought it was refreshing to have a novel that wasn’t a constant train of action and twists and turns. If you prefer novels with punch and movement, then you might feel this one is a bit slow and uneventful – though things do happen, it isn’t in a “cliffhanger at the end of each chapter” kind of way. I can appreciate both, but I enjoyed that this had a more normal, day to day pace. It made it easy to relate to Kaelyn and her fears.

Not surprisingly, there’s a romance, but I thought it was nicely done. It doesn’t overshadow the dangerous situation or Kaelyn’s worrying for her family, and offers to Kaelyn a little more perspective on things outside her house. There are few characters, but you get a sense of constant danger for them – and indeed, the author isn’t afraid to end some of them’s life along the way. Kaelyn herself was an interesting character, a regular girl with a lot of strength but also some flaws. While she was a bit forgettable, she was a character I appreciated both in her strong and weak moments.

I was at first a bit confused by the ending, mainly because I had no idea it was the first in a series and not a stand alone novel. Reaching the last page, there is a lot we still don’t know, mainly on the situation outside the island. Since it’s been quarantined all along, we have very little knowledge on whether the virus has traveled outside the island into Canada or the United States, and in what measure. This being said, The Way we Fall was a quick quiet read that gave me a lot to think about, and I look forward to reading the next novel.

Series Reading Order :

1. The Way we Fall
2. The Lives we Lost (coming January 2013)