The Fall of Lisa Bellow

January 9, 2017
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. Agent: Molly Friedrich, Friedrich Agency

Starred review from October 15, 2016
Two eighth-graders witness an armed robbery in a sandwich shop. One is taken, the other left behind--making her a very lucky, very troubled girl.It must be because Lisa Bellow weighs 15 pounds less and is hotter than her: that's one of Meredith Oliver's thoughts as she tries to understand what happened at the Deli Barn, where she stopped for a root beer after a particularly trying algebra class and ended up witnessing the kidnapping of her middle school's No. 1 mean girl. Meredith's nonabduction befalls the Oliver family less than a year after another out-of-the-blue trauma--her brother, a high school baseball star, had his left eye and socket completely crushed by a foul ball. We track the family's attempt to cope with these misfortunes through the alternating perspectives of Meredith and her mother, Claire. Overwhelmed by her parents' solicitousness--"Her father was a flashing yellow light in the middle of the kitchen; her mother's smile looked like she'd drawn it on her face after consulting an illustrated encyclopedia of expressions"--Meredith slips further and further away, her concern with Lisa's disappearance becoming obsessional, which Perabo (Why They Run the Way They Do, 2016, etc.) conveys using a daring and suspenseful narrative strategy. Claire Oliver, who shares a dental practice with her good-natured, unfailingly kind husband, Mark, is as fine a fictional character as we have encountered in some time, dark, moody, passionate about her children, keenly self-aware, and very, very funny. Contemplating her own mother's long-ago death, for example, she thinks, "God...death was complicated. And exhausting. And apparently it just kept on being complicated and exhausting forever, probably until you yourself died and became an exhausting complication someone else had to constantly negotiate." You will hate to leave the inside of this woman's head when you finish the book. The texture of family life as it unravels, then begins to regenerate, is conveyed with unflinching clarity and redemptive good humor.

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May 1, 2017

Meredith is a typical seventh grader teetering between the innocence of childhood and the worldliness of adolescence. Her adored older brother Evan sustained an injury months earlier, ending his college scholarship hopes and blinding him in one eye. Meredith, as the second child, is unsure of her role in the family. At school she is also in between: not in the popular group (though she obsesses over the girls who do rule the middle school halls) but not a total loser, either. Mean-spirited and sharp-tongued Lisa Bellow is the undisputed queen of the junior high elite, and Meredith and Lisa have little in common. Then Meredith stops into a deli after school for a soda and sees Lisa there getting a sandwich. A masked man enters, looking for money, and abducts Lisa. The popular kids, Lisa's young single mother, and others in town join the search for the missing girl. At this point, Perabo introduces her strongest conceit: artfully cutting between scenes in which Meredith has been left behind and those in which Meredith was kidnapped along with Lisa. The true nature of these seemingly contradictory sections is left intentionally vague and should keep readers intrigued. Readers will empathize with Meredith, while older teens will also be drawn to Meredith's mother, Claire. The pairing of typical family life with the ripped-from-the-headlines drama results in a thoughtful, unforgettable story. VERDICT A hypnotically suspenseful novel dissecting the effects of a young girl's trauma. Purchase where trendy psychological thrillers are popular.-Tara Kehoe, formerly at the New Jersey State Library Talking Book and Braille Center, Trenton

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