Reading slumps are a bitch.
Now that I feel like I’m finally pulling myself out of a reading rut, I found it in me to basically pile-drive my way through a nearly 500 page book. Having a movie companion always helps. So here I am with a long awaited book diary entry. Let’s talk about Before I Fall.
The Book
Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver is a book that’s probably been on my radar since it released. It’s exactly the kind of book that is up my alley: full of death, angst, and just a touch of something heart warming.
The book is told from the point of view of former loser and current mean girl Sam Kingston. On February 12th Sam goes to a party, gets into a car accident, and dies. That is until she wakes up to find that it’s February 12th all over again. Sam faces her final day on repeat while she solves the mystery behind her death and more importantly find what really matters in life.
While this book started a bit slow for me, after I trudged through the first 50 or so page day I flew through this book. It was almost impossible to put down. I haven’t read like that in a hot minute. It felt amazing. So to say I had a good reading experience with this one would be putting it lightly.
This story pretty much ticks all the things I look for in a good YA contemporary: complex and dimensional characters, a nice slow burn romance, strong character relationships, interesting side characters, and a moving plot that haunts you even after you’ve finished the last page. But after I finished reading the last page I felt a bit bewildered. The ending is definitely powerful and beautiful, but if you think too much about it (and I’m the queen of thinking too much about things) it might leave your brain hurting. Without spoiling anything, my advice is seriously don’t dive in too deep on whether the ending makes sense or not because then it definitely won’t make sense. Really that’s my only gripe with this one, though.
The Movie
So of course this experience had to be a package deal. Pretty much the whole reason I read the book was so I could watch the movie. I’m a sucker book-based films. They’re my bread and butter just under horror films. To put it simply, this is a really solid book-to-movie adaptation. I was thoroughly surprised by how much I did actually enjoy this movie.
My adaptation expectations are always realistically low. Typically I’m prepared to hate watch these kind of movies with maybe a slight bit of hope that I won’t have to. For the most part I was pleased with the changes they made. Obviously they condensed a lot, removed a few minor characters, and tightened up a few of the less important subplots, but really the heart of this story was completely intact. Also, I feel like this is the kind of movie you could take your non-reader friends to and they won’t be lost. However, it seems that a lot of non-reader viewers had a hard time feeling for the characters in this film. I still was able to feel for them, but I may have been blinded by my feelings for them from the book. I’d say, though, if a non-reader can embrace the grayness of these character, this will be a perfectly enjoyable watch for them as well.
Overall, this may not be the kind of movie I would make a ritual out of watching, but I definitely think it was a moving watch and a strong adaptation. It also, made the more brain numbing parts at the end a bit more digestible. If you’ve read the book I would highly recommend this one.
Final judgement: This book nerd is feeling pretty satisfied with this book/movie adventure.
The Tracks At Christie Road 