Falling into Place

Liz Emerson (Falling Into Place, by Amy Zhang)
 Falling Into Place opens with popular girl Liz Emerson’s life hanging in the balance, after she drives her Mercedes off the road in an apparent suicide attempt. The book zig-zags between present and past, cataloguing the mean-girl crimes that fuel Liz’s self-hatred, but also elucidating the girl she’s capable of being: a girl who wishes someone would punish her for her repeat offenses, who once played with an imaginary friend (presented here as a narrator), and a girl who still commands the love of one of her victims, a boy who’s waiting, in more ways than one, for her to wake up. Zhang doesn’t use Liz’s pain to make her interesting; instead, she builds a character, layer by layer, who we believe is capable of containing the multitudes that make her deserving of both punishment and love.