High School Book Club REPORT

There were 18 of us at High School Book Club Tuesday night to discuss Before I Fall, by Lauren Oliver, a Groundhog Day-like story of a girl who relives the same day seven times, until she gets it right. Several people identified with various characters, even the mean ones, because of their secrets and back stories; some of us had a problem with the protagonist, Sam, though we liked her interactions with her little sister and her heroism at the end; and on balance, nobody hated it but nobody really loved it. Our rating: 6.8. Next month we are reading Shiver, by Maggie Stiefvater, and the following month it will be Marcelo in the Real World, by Francisco X. Stork.

 Other books we considered:

The Chaos Code, by Justin Richards
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, by Mark Haddon
Sacred Scars, by Kathleen Duey
Everything is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer