The Fall of Lisa Bellow: A Novel

Susan Perabo

Mar 2017 · Sold by Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

The breakout novel from the critically acclaimed author of the short story collections Who I Was Supposed to Be and Why They Run the Way They Do—when a middle school girl is abducted in broad daylight, a fellow student and witness to the crime copes with the tragedy in unforgettable ways.

What happens to the girl left behind?

A masked man with a gun enters a sandwich shop in broad daylight, and Meredith Oliver finds herself ordered to the filthy floor, where she trembles face to face with her nemesis, Lisa Bellow—the most popular girl in her eighth grade class. Lying there, Meredith is utterly convinced she will die. But then the gunman orders Lisa Bellow to stand and come with him, leaving Meredith cowering in the wake of a life-altering near-tragedy.

As the community stages vigils and search parties for Lisa Bellow, Meredith spends days shut away in her room, hiding in the dark landscape of her imagination. Meredith’s mother, Claire, can see that her daughter is irreparably changed—she is here, but not. And as Claire grows more and more desperate to reach her, it becomes clear that Meredith is in a place where Claire can’t go, searching for Lisa Bellow where no one else can.

The Fall of Lisa Bellow is a beautiful illustration of how one family, broken by tragedy, finds healing and makes sense of the nonsensical. In this “daring” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review), “sharp, and suspenseful” (Publishers Weekly), “utterly captivating and achingly beautiful” (Kimberly McCreight, New York Times bestselling author of Reconstructing Amelia) novel, the critically acclaimed Susan Perabo asserts herself yet again as an engrossing storyteller and a master at cracking open the human psyche.

Ratings and reviews

I received a copy of this book courtesy of NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This book came at a bad time for me. When I started reading the book I had just read a newspaper article of a friend that had gone missing. There were periods I could not bring myself to read this book. Then I would read it with the hope of solving the mystery just as I would hunt through the internet looking for new clues on the whereabouts of my missing friend. The book revolves around the drama suffered by two of the main characters and how that drama effects everyone around them in different ways. The detail in the emotional trauma suffered by Meredith and her family was engaging and realistic. However, if you are wanting to read a mystery that is not the focus of this book. It is more of a family drama. As a mom, it was disappointing that the writing makes it appear the whole family is against the mother. She cannot say anything right, everything is misconstrued. It is heartbreaking how she struggles to protect her family and maintain her marriage with so little support or success. Personally, I did not like the ending. I needed more closure. I felt like it was a writing cop-out to leave the book “unfinished”.

The story went on and on never bringing Lisa to a conclusion.

About the author

Susan Perabo is the author of the collections of short stories, Who I Was Supposed to Be and Why They Run the Way They Do, and the novels The Broken Places and The Fall of Lisa Bellow. Her fiction has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, and New Stories from the South, and has appeared in numerous magazines, including One Story, Glimmer Train, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, and The Sun. She is Writer in Residence and professor of English at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and on the faculty of the low-residency MFA Program at Queens University. She holds an MFA from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.