Falling From Grace
by Jane Godwin
Kip. Annie. Grace. David. Ted.
Five different people.
One terrible night.
Falling from Grace, on a scale from 0 to 100 on the "supardooparawesomness" scale would be about a 73. It's a good read, and Jane is a decent author, but it was something about the ending that disappointed me.
The general idea of the story is that there are two sisters, Annie and Grace, who are playing "Lets annoy daddy by pretending we are Hansel and Gretel and for some reason he's the big bad wolf who's come to follow our bread crumb trail" along a cliffy peninsula. A storm starts and the girls try to climb over some rocks when they come across a penguin, which Grace (who is meant to be the eldest but for a majority of the book seems like a complete toddler) puts into their backpack, which she later drops when the tide turns to flood water. Annie has this smart idea to hike over some impossible rocks while Grace wants to wander back the way they came because she dropped the backpack and penguin. Annie gets over the top of the rocks... Grace goes missing under the waves. I must admit, my heart was racing at this point.
Meanwhile, Kip is having bizzare experiences of his own. He's walking down the road with his Ipod blaring when this kid jumps out of a moving car and screams at him before running off. So Kip becomes obsessed with finding the kid, who we later find out is David. Instead, he meets Ted and finds the backpack with the dead penguin. Kip is later accused of knowing where Grace is and to an extent, murdering her. Don't worry though, Kip didn't murder Grace.
Ted is a storyline within himself. The guy has serious issues.
"I wouldn't have gone in, but his lights were on. Every single one of them. I wondered if he was still pissed off...
'Hi there, soldier,' he said, opening the door for me as if two o' clock in the morning was a regular time to drop by." (Pg 120)
He is frequently getting angry, he spikes Kip's coke, and he knows David. Here I am trying not to spill the ending.
But here's my problem with the book. The last two chapters are "Looking back" and the one before that is a completely different story all together, when David's mum shows up in Ted's house. These events may seem related, but David isn't a main character, so his mum is certainly of no importance. And the end of that chapter is perfect sequal material:
"Now he's got my son and I need to find him." (pg 185)
... Nice. Since you were the one who threw your son out of the car and drove off in the first place... classy.
I'm probably the only one who was bugged by the last few chapters, but they were a bit of a drag for me.
All in all, Falling from Grace earns a 73%.
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Reviews: 160