Falling into Place by Amy Zhang

This review is spoiler free!!!

My rating: 4/5 stars

Liz Emerson is an awful person. She's a bully. She bosses her friends around. She destroys people's lives just because she can. But the thing about Liz is that she knows she's an awful person and she hates herself for it. She hates herself so much that she attempts to kill herself. At first, I had a hard time caring if she died because she's so awful. But the further we got into her story, the more I identified with her. I'm not nearly as awful as Liz, but I've done bad things to people I care about and hated myself deeply afterward. So I was able to slightly understand Liz and empathize with her. She's not the kind of main character that you'll ever like, but at the end, I was rooting for her at least.

This book is told from the viewpoint of an unconventional narrator. But this narrator can be anywhere and see everything, so it isn't all that different from 3rd person. It was unique though. There's also a lot of time jumps - the book opens moments after the car crash and then jumps back months, then forward, then back - but not at predictable intervals. It can be a little difficult to keep up with, but it kept it more interesting than if it was told in a linear fashion.