Ashleigh Paige

Also appears on my blog, The YA Kitten!My Courtney Summers Love-a-Thon, begun when I fell in love with her latest novel This Is Not a Test, continues with her third novel, Fall for Anything. In a small town, a daughter's grief over her father's mysterious suicide grabs hold of readers by the throat and won't let them go until the last page is turned. As always, the enviable prose and ability to wrench so much emotion from both the characters and from readers makes me wish I could crawl around in the author's head and figure out how she does it.Like all of Summers' heroines, Eddie isn't an easy girl to like and sympathizing with her can be hard sometimes, especially considering what she puts her friends and family through later in the book. Her grief is all too real and incredibly powerful, and the sparse yet poetic prose help bring all the painful emotions the characters express to life. Why these books aren't more popular when they're so real and can make you feel what the characters are going through no matter what situation you're in is a mystery to me. A question without an answer.The novel is difficult to get into for the first eighty pages, but once Culler came in (let's not talk about Culler; I want to hurt him and that's all you need to know) and he brought his camera with him, I couldn't put it down. It helps that I'm somewhat into photography myself, though I think the novel would have drawn me in regardless of whether or not I was. It's the storytelling element of photography as used in the novel that really spoke to me and make me keep turning the pages, along with Eddie's journey to find out why.In the end, we never really learn why Eddie's dad did what he did and though the questions I still have nag at me (like why Eddie hated Missy so much and did half the stuff she did), I think it's okay for me to not have all the answers. Some questions simply don't have answers or if they did have an answer at some point, it's no longer possible to find out what it is. I feel that's one of the themes of this novel: you're never going to have all the answers because life isn't that easy.Now I'm almost completely caught up on Courtney Summers' backlist, leaving Some Girls Are the only books of hers I haven't read (barring the books she hasn't published yet, of course). I plan to get a copy of that soon; I hear it's her strongest work and I'm looking forward to it.