FALL FOR ANYTHING

By Courtney Summers

St. Martin's Griffin

This book puts the whys? of death into your face like a punch for an answer. With each book Courtney Summers offers up to her readers characters who with every mouthful of air are part of what we all are as human beings. These are not cookie cutter characters for a writer’s goal but characters of living life through a story.
I love the harshness, the reality, the drinking of tears she shows with bravery in all of her books; which have been better with each one. Starting with CRACKED UP TO BE. Then SOME GIRLS ARE. And now FALL FOR ANYTHING.

Fall For Anything explores suicide, death, selfish grief, artistic shortsightedness, and the road of answering what truth can be found in the thoughts of someone after they have lost someone important from their life? These are not things which are made up of one superior answer or one way of thinking.

This writer can write pain as if she was holding you down and holding a scalpel to script the words into memories of events from your own life. Like with Some Girls Are, Fall For Anything connected with me not through pages of things that are similar to things that happen in my life but from little moments, scenes even that existed within the book as a sum total.

I believe it sometimes can be more powerful within a book when you are reading and a sentence or a scene rips you back to you life for a little while. You pause. You remember. You may even cry but then you continue with the story now invested in a way that maybe even the writer did not expect.

Even though I had a friend who committed suicide who was family to me it was the character of Milo who I identified with in larger ways in this book for reasons I will not get into for this review but that is the power of books. A great writer creates great characters who live their lives within a story that can make us smile, talk to a friend, tear, or need to take a break in proceedings to go watch something really stupid like Two And A Half Men. But you have to love books for that because they create that connect that makes you want to rush back to them as soon as you can.

The short cast list gives us time to really get into the lives of each character as time unfolds. Eddie stands in the after time of her father’s suicide with a mother who seems to have almost died in her own way, a pushy friend of her mother’s always getting into her face, a best friend who have information she wants, and a stranger linked to parts of her father’s life she didn’t know about.

I think in the end Eddie just wants to scream to her father, “Why did you have to do this now!? I’m not ready for something like this now!” But that is how life strips us of our days sometimes, by giving us things that we are not ready for but nonetheless faced with.

4 out of 5 Stars

FALL FOR ANYTHING