Laura Moriarty < Liane Moriarty

I grabbed this one from the library’s free ebook site. I thought at first that it might be a Liane Moriarty book that I’d missed, but no — different author, and not nearly as good.

While I’m Falling starts with a divorce — Veronica’s parents break up after not quite an infidelity, but some definite sketchy business on Veronica’s mother’s behalf. While Veronica struggles through her third year of college, her parents fight over money and the house and their own issues. Veronica’s boyfriend wants her to move in with him. Veronica can’t keep up with her RA duties. Veronica, Veronica, Veronica.

In her defense, she is the main character. But my god, she really comes off as a pill. She makes some very, very dumb decisions during the course of the book (like, throwing a house party in someone else’s house, almost immediately after crashing that person’s car). She drags her poor mother, who, yeah, maybe should have gone about “finding herself” in a different manner but SO does not deserve what her family puts her through, into all this shit, too.

The story itself isn’t bad — the fallout of a divorce, the feeling of taking sides, etc. But it’s anchored on someone who gradually irritated me more and more as the story went on, and that anchor really dragged the whole thing down.