isabella's+book+review

Before I Fall By Lauren Oliver

Review by Isabella Khoury from 8 Green

This book was set in the modern days of Sydney Australia. The main setting is at Samantha’s high school and at one of her peer’s parties.

This book mainly revolves around the life of a teenage girl, Samantha Kingston. She has it all, the perfect boyfriend, a great group of friends, looks and excellent grades at school. She lives under the impression that she has her life all under control.

Everything is going just fine in Samantha Kingston’s life, until one day she wakes up and everything changes. Like most teenagers, death doesn’t concern her all that much, but on that Friday night Samantha and her friends are involved in a tragic car accident. Sam would always be known as that stereotypical popular girl. However, the next day, Sam wakes up to find herself on the same Friday, and she once again has the chance to put things right, for her last day alive.

The main relationships in this book are the ones between Samantha and her group of friends. During the time where Sam is forced to live her days over and over again, she finds out things about her so-called best friends that changes her opinion and outlook on them and their personalities. She realises that the people that she doesn’t interact with, are actually the ones that are the friendliest. She re-gains an old friendship with the so called school nerd and realises that he’s nothing as what people make him out to be. She comes to terms with reality and starts to realise that she is not known as a nice person and slowly starts to discover that she doesn’t have as many friends as what she thought. The main issue in this book is Samantha’s late realisation to what her life should’ve been like. If she had realised earlier it would have changed her life for the better, but instead it took having to live the last day of her life several times for her to see what really mattered.

When reading this book, I felt completely captivated by the words that Lauren Oliver had put on the page before me. I feel that this book should be used as a teaching method or even as an English book to really teach readers about the different styles of writing there is out there. I highly recommend this book to teenage girls because it helps bring them back to reality, and reminds them of the things that should be most important to them. It had this effect on me.