Review: While I'm Falling, by Laura Moriarty

When I grabbed Falling off of the shelf, I expected more of a light, YA-type read; after all, it's about a college student whose parents are getting divorced. I imagined something that would clear my brain like sherbet after asian takeout, leaving it fairly clean for the next, more meaty read.

What I got was a surprisingly in-depth, mature narrative about a young woman's decent into the messiness of life. Veronica is a pre-med student at a Kansas college, when she finds out that her parents are divorcing because her father came home early from a business trip and found a man sleeping in his bed, with a note to the 'beautiful dreamer' from his wife instructing him to be gone before her husband returns. In later chapters, we find that of course, it's not that simple, but the fact remains that while Veronica is going through the messiest years of her own life - first relationships, first big mistakes, failing her first class - her parents are as well, with her father attempting to use his lawyer's training to rake her mother through the coals in court and her mother sliding into poverty and, eventually, homelessness. Veronica finds herself needing to care for her mother when she can't even fulfill her RA commitment in her dorm to assist the younger students. At the same time, her mother has to leave her own misery behind and help Veronica cope with the repercussions of her own childish mistakes.

'Falling' is a painful read at times. All of us have screwed up in ways that effect not only ourselves, but others as well, and as in real life, the truly interesting meat of the story is in how the characters move on from their mistakes and re-create their lives. Before that happens, however, the reader has to slog through every miserable moment with Veronica, and it's truly not pleasant because I, at least, could see myself in her; her actions, some of which were largely originated by circumstances out of her control, could very well have been my own at her age. Because I have already been through her phase of life, I could see where she was heading, and it was like a train wreck. Moriarty doesn't dumb-down her characters to fit into stereotypical molds, nor does she insult the reader by overkilling the details; we find out the backstories of the events, but are not forced to re-live them through each character's perception. We do eventually find out why there was a man in the bed, and how it came to that point, but it's almost as though the information is whispered to us; there is a clear feeling that Veronica and her older sister do not know all the details that we are learning, and that that is how it should be. We need them to understand how we got where things are at, and to humanize the parents.

This is important, for while Falling is largely focused on Veronica, it is also the larger story of family and relationships, and how real people can fall off of their pedestals and create new lives for themselves. The painful mistakes are worth the read, because the ways the characters accept their blame and move forward are honest. While the final chapter is slightly too tied-up-with-a-bow, I have to admit to occasionally liking that kind of thing, so I was good with it.

Rating: four stars. Real, adult look at life mistakes, consequences, and redemptions.