Catch Her When She Falls by Allison Buccola

 

 DNF @ 20%

As soon as I heard the premise of CATCH HER WHEN SHE FALLS, I was hooked. Did I care that the Goodreads rating was low? Absolutely not. Fuck the haters, I thought, YOLO-ing my way to the 'Zon. I went into this book expecting something kind of like JAR OF HEARTS, but that was definitely not what I got. Which is 100% not this book's fault. The problem is, I'm not really sure what I got.

The hook of this book is that Micah is still haunted by the events that went down in her high school ten years ago when she found out that her boyfriend, Alex, was cheating on her with her BFF, Emily, only to kill her and end up in jail for it. Now an adult, she is returning to the town of Calvary after her mother's death, and when she's there, she finds out that there are people who believe Alex was innocent.

I personally found this book unreadable because it was so difficult to follow all of the converging timelines. There's parts that take place ten years in the past, but the present often wanders. Sometimes we get Micah in her car, on a roadtrip to somewhere. Sometimes it's in the present, but slightly more in the past, and nested within that are even more flashbacks. Each chapter is a different timeline but there are timelines within timelines.

I wonder if maybe this book was too clever for its own good. Like, maybe the author was doing what Megan Miranda did in that one book that's actually written backwards, where these dissociative POVs are supposed to reflect Micah's "unhinged" mental state (per the book summary). If so, I appreciate the artistry of that, but it really did not work for me as a reader the way it was done. That said, there were clever little pockets of writing in here that make me think this author could write a follow-up that I'd love, this one just wasn't it for me.

2 to 2.5 out of 5 stars