The Fall of Lisa Bellow
A Novel
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3.8 • 25 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The breakout novel from the critically acclaimed author of the short story collections Who I Was Supposed to Be and Why They Run the Way They Do—when a middle school girl is abducted in broad daylight, a fellow student and witness to the crime copes with the tragedy in unforgettable ways.
What happens to the girl left behind?
A masked man with a gun enters a sandwich shop in broad daylight, and Meredith Oliver finds herself ordered to the filthy floor, where she trembles face to face with her nemesis, Lisa Bellow—the most popular girl in her eighth grade class. Lying there, Meredith is utterly convinced she will die. But then the gunman orders Lisa Bellow to stand and come with him, leaving Meredith cowering in the wake of a life-altering near-tragedy.
As the community stages vigils and search parties for Lisa Bellow, Meredith spends days shut away in her room, hiding in the dark landscape of her imagination. Meredith’s mother, Claire, can see that her daughter is irreparably changed—she is here, but not. And as Claire grows more and more desperate to reach her, it becomes clear that Meredith is in a place where Claire can’t go, searching for Lisa Bellow where no one else can.
The Fall of Lisa Bellow is a beautiful illustration of how one family, broken by tragedy, finds healing and makes sense of the nonsensical. In this “daring” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review), “sharp, and suspenseful” (Publishers Weekly), “utterly captivating and achingly beautiful” (Kimberly McCreight, New York Times bestselling author of Reconstructing Amelia) novel, the critically acclaimed Susan Perabo asserts herself yet again as an engrossing storyteller and a master at cracking open the human psyche.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This edgy and intense novel takes us into the minds of bystanders whose lives are shattered by a shocking crime. Lisa Bellow is a bully at the local middle school. One afternoon, she’s abducted from a nearby deli, while her classmate Meredith Oliver just barely escapes. Through gripping detail and the voices of Meredith and her mother, author Susan Perabo develops a complex emotional landscape. The Fall of Lisa Bellow is a story about survivor’s guilt and the many faces of grief, as well as family and forgiveness.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A middle-class suburban family, comfortable in a life that has provided them with "a lovely home and roomy van and a reliable second car," is the subject of the sharp and suspenseful novel from the author of The Broken Places. Parents Claire and Mark, who share a dental practice, have just begun to recover from a freak baseball-practice accident that has left their son, high school senior Evan, nearly blind in one eye when their daughter, 13-year-old Meredith, finds herself the victim of an armed robbery at a local deli. During the incident Meredith's classmate Lisa is kidnapped, while Meredith is left lying on the floor. Traumatized, over the next few months she retreats gradually into her own imaginary world. The novel's tension arises as much from Perabo's insight into a complex and changing family dynamic as from the horror of an unusual but believable situation. Perabo's female characters are particularly strong. Meredith's struggles to make sense of the middle-school social hierarchy parallel Claire's efforts to overcome her ambivalence about motherhood, and both are heightened by the attack and its aftermath. Survivor's guilt takes on a unique form here, as the novel plays with the reader's understanding of what is actually going on in Meredith's world.)
