How to Survive the Unsurvivable

Reading The Shock of the Fall took me back to my early teens a little bit. Because back then, before wizard, vampires, and dystopian societies had exploded the YA market, the age-appropriate books found in my local library fell mostly into two categories: the ones with horses and the ones with problems. Sometimes the categories overlapped of course, so you’d get books with horses and problems. For a few years, after picture books and Nancy Drew, but before my brief Serious Adult Classics Only phase I read a lot of books with horses and/or problems.
Nathan Filer’s first novel is a book with problems. Lots of them, in fact. Our narrator, Matthew, lost his brother as a child under clearly traumatic circumstances, but we only find out how everything happened towards the end of the book. We do know that Matt’s brother Simon had Down’s syndrome. We also find out that in the present time, when Matt is telling his story, he suffers from some kind of mental illness. The story jerks back and forth as it unfolds.
Filer does a commendable job in exploring difficult themes without sentimentality or sensationalism (for the most part, more on that in a bit). The novel is structured effectively, and the writing pleasing. And Matt is a wonderful creation. You have to care for him, and like him, not because he’s particularly likable, but because he IS. He can’t be summed up in simple terms such as likable or unlikable, he’s too complex for that.
It’s really such a pity then that the plot falters at the last pages just a little bit. Here we have sentimentality, and what’s worse, sentimentality that rings false. The rest of the book is so filled with truth that the elements that are less so are jarring indeed.