Hello,
I am so thrilled to be participating in the First Look Book Club at BN.com, and equally thrilled (and grateful) that you have chosen to participate. I am sure that you all have many demands on your time, and many ways in which to spend your leisure hours—the fact that you have chosen to dedicate some of them to my book means so much to me.
I have two hopes for you as you begin to read Before I Fall. The first is simply this: I hope that in the beginning, you do not like the main character, Samantha, or her three best friends. I hope you find them mean, petty, self-absorbed, and superficial.
This might seem paradoxical or just plain odd. Isn’t it the major goal of a writer to create sympathetic characters? But actually, I might go even further. I would wish, in an ideal world, that you did not like them and that you did not find them realistic; that if you found them mean, you also found them unrecognizably so; if self-absorbed and superficial and occasionally cruel, also incomprehensible.
In an ideal world, I would hope that you had never met, and would never in your life meet, people like Sam and her friends.
My guess, however—or maybe my gamble?—is that you will both dislike them and find them all-too-familiar.
My second hope is more conventional. I hope that by the end of the book you will love Sam, and that you will have come to a deeper understanding of her friends, with all of their faults and frailties.
This is a book about a lot of things. It’s about friendship, and connection, and the things that give life meaning; it’s also about kisses, and Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, and small towns, and errors in judgment, and social hierarchies. But above all, it’s a novel about change. Sam grows and becomes better, as I believe we can all grow and become better, no matter what our circumstances.
In that way, I think, it is also a novel about hope. And so you might say I have a third wish for you: I hope that hope is what you find in its pages.
Happy reading!
--Lauren
