"What if you only had one day to live? What would you do? Who would you kiss? And how far would you go to save your own life?"


Samantha Kingston has died. And she's done it more than once. A late night party, and her friends recklessness, as well as her own, led her to her fate. It may have seemed to be sealed in stone, but somehow, she wakes up again, on the morning of the exact same day. Sam doesn't realize it at first, but she wasn't who she always seemed to be, or who she really wanted to be.


The book, Before I Fall, by Lauren Oliver has an interesting plot, and uses descriptive language to create a scene in your head. You can see every moment, from when Sam gets up, to when she dies. And when it starts all over again, you can imagine it even better, the diverse vocabulary creating the same image, in many different ways. I always enjoy being able to see a character of a setting in my head clearly, and I believe that Lauren Oliver has done a fantastic job of creating this book in a way that it runs like a movie in my mind, even after the fifth or sixth repeated day.


You can imagine, that with the same day repeating seven times, that the reading would become quite over-bearing and dreadful. The first time you read about what happens, it sucks you in, almost immediately, but when the same thing happens one or two more times, it got a little boring and hard to drag through. I am glad I continued on though, because the story progressed greatly, and the suspense built dramatically. By the third or fourth day, the book begins to pick back up again for the simple reason that Samantha finally realizes what she's doing wrong in her life.


I enjoyed watching Sam change, and see her own life the way everyone around her saw it. They all saw her as the stuck up, rude, brat that got what she wanted, and received more attention than she deserved. In simpler words, the popular girl. Samantha always had thought they were just jealous of her and her friends, but she realized that wasn't it. Some people even had pity on her. She had been dragged into an unrealistic world of parties, drinking, attention seeking, and the main focus of staying popular. She seems to get that if she wants to save herself, she should have noticed all of this much sooner, but she still makes desperate attempts to save herself from death.



Lauren Oliver composed this story in such a wonderful way, that you get sucked into it, but I wouldn't suggest it to all readers because of some of the strong language that the author adds into some sections. In this case, the book would be most suitable for teen readers. Despite some things that may make this book inappropriate for younger readers, Before I Fall, shows what decisions people make in the chance to become popular. It shows what people will do, change, and look past for that chance to be known by everyone. Sam looked past her friends faults and flaws, and that made her just as bad as them. Death gets her before she has a chance to change herself, and all she's ever done wrong. Before I Fall, has a strong message to live your life the way you want to, and to take people as they are. Never regret what you have done, and always do things the way you want to. It shows that you should never change your unique self to become a close copy of someone else. Although Samantha may not have a chance to fix what she's done, I've learned from this story, to always be who I want to, and never let anything change me for an opportunity to be known in society.