The Way We Fall by Megan Crewe

I have been burned by those Publishers Weekly e-mail blasts before. A perfect first chapter that degenerated into an implausible book, an ad for something that sounded right up my alley (but the ad lied), for stuff that has the marketing dollars but isn't more than a copycat.

However.

I got, and maybe you got, the ad for Megan Crewe's The Way We Fall (Hyperion), and lo and behold, there it was, next to my bed, in the reading pile. I've read blog posts and things by Megan Crewe, and I recognized her name, and I've been meaning to read something of hers for a while, so it was very easy to pick the book up--and very hard to put it down.





If you're tired of not knowing how the apocalypse happened, if you're tired of fast-forwarding to the point where the government is only a whacked-out dystopia, if you love stuff like The Hot Zone and The Stand, if you enjoy Robin Cook, well: I think you'll like this. Kaelyn's friend's dad is first. He's acting weird, and then he's dead. And then everyone on the island off Canada is stuck, the ferries stopped, the soldiers gone. The rate of survival is abysmally low.

But this isn't just action/adventure; Kaelyn's relationships with her former best friend and his girlfriend, her family (including the cousin she must care for), and the people she used to know before this all happened are complicated and rich. This is exactly what teen speculative fiction should look like: a mix of realistic relationships and sciences/futures/what-ifs.

For those of you doing collection development, Kaelyn is half black, half white. (It's not clear from the cover or a plot point, so it might be easy to miss; that said, I do like the cover, because it's not a girl in a flowy ballgown.)

This book is nominated in the YA SF/F category for the 2012 Cybils. I had my own copy to read and review.