Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver

Sam is your average popular girl – self-centred, vain, pretty, bitchy; likes to party, get drunk with a gorgeous boyfriend and has great but equally bitchy friends. As far as she is concerned, February the 12^th is just like any other day, with the exception that she plans on losing her virginity to her boyfriend. She certainly doesn’t expect to die. And she definitely doesn’t expect to wake up on the morning of February the 12^th…again and again. She soon realises that she isn’t going to escape the Groundhog Day scenario without doing something drastic, and over the course of seven days she perhaps learns more about herself and the world around her than she ever did in her eighteen years of life.

Oliver manages to create an extremely realistic school setting and teenage pupils – it almost seems as though you once attended Thomas Jefferson High, with the same teachers and bitchy girls. Each character is unique, complex and are fleshed out well. I defy anyone to like Sam at first – she’s shallow, bitchy and selfish but you grow to partially understand why she is like that. Her character development is wonderful and paced very well – she doesn’t improve as a person too quick, but at the perfect pace and you end up really liking and vying for her. Kent is such a cutie and I really hate how Sam treats him at first.

Oliver is such a good writer – her words are beautiful and insightful. After reading ‘Day 1’ and getting partway through ‘Day 2’ I thought ‘Oh no’ because the pace is pretty slow at first but Oliver manages to make the exact same day wonderfully different, and Sam’s attempts to change her fate make for unputdownable reading, especially in the edge-of-your-seat climax. Before I Fall is inspirational and thought-provoking with a clever plot and Oliver’s wonderful writing - I really can't say any more than that; other than it should be compulsory reading. 

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[SYNOPSIS: They say that when you die your whole life flashes before your eyes, but that's not how it happened for me. 

Sam Kingston is dead. Except she isn't.
On a rainy February night, eighteen-year-old Sam is killed in a horrific car crash. But then the impossible happens: she wakes up in her own bed, on the morning of the day that she died.
Forced to live over and over the last day of her life the drive to school, skipping class, the fateful party she desperately struggles to alter the outcome, but every morning she wakes up on the day of the crash.
This is a story of a girl who dies young, but in the process learns how to live. And who falls in love... a little too late.]