The Fall of Lisa Bellow
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3.7 • 6 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
What happens to the girl left behind?
A masked man with a gun enters a sandwich shop in broad daylight, and Meredith Oliver suddenly finds herself ordered to the filthy floor, where she cowers face to face with her nemesis, Lisa Bellow, the most popular girl in her eighth grade class. The minutes tick inexorably by, and Meredith lurches between comforting the sobbing Lisa and imagining her own impending death. Then the man orders Lisa Bellow to stand and come with him, leaving Meredith behind.
After Lisa’s abduction, Meredith spends most days in her room. As the community stages vigils and searches, Claire, Meredith’s mother, is torn between relief that her daughter is alive and helplessness over her inability to protect or even comfort her child. Her daughter is here, but not.
The Fall of Lisa Bellow is edgy and original, a hair-raising exploration of the ripple effects of an unthinkable crime.
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.)
