Book Review: The fall of Lisa Bellow - S. Perabo

I didn't dislike this novel enough to abandon it, but, while reading it, I kept thinking of what next I was going to read to give me an incentive to speed it up.
Overall, not impressed by this book, it is a well written story about a middle class American family which starts as picture-perfect but ends up with a lot of tragedy. The character I liked the most is Evan, the brother, who is funny and, despite his accident, keeps it together.
I disliked the father, not a very strong figure, and I had mixed feelings for the mother.
In summary, nothing really happens and we just read about the various reactions in the family in the aftermath of the tragedy. I found it quite dull and tedious at times.

Overall rating:  5   Plot: 6   Writing style: 5   Cover:  4

Title: The fall of Lisa Bellow 

Author: Susan Perabo
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Pages: 352
Publication year: 2017

The Plot:

A masked man with a gun enters a sandwich shop in broad daylight, and Meredith Oliver suddenly finds herself ordered to the filthy floor, where she cowers face to face with her nemesis, Lisa Bellow, the most popular girl in her class. The minutes tick inexorably by, and Meredith lurches between comforting the sobbing Lisa and imagining her own impending death. Then the man orders Lisa Bellow to stand and come with him, leaving Meredith behind. After Lisa’s abduction, Meredith spends most days in her room. As the community stages vigils and searches, Claire, Meredith’s mother, is torn between relief that her daughter is alive and helplessness over her inability to protect or even comfort her child. Her daughter is here, but not. How can life ever move forward again?

The Author:
Susan Perabo is the author of the collections of short stories, Who I Was Supposed to Be and Why They Run the Way They Do, and the novels The Broken Places and The Fall of Lisa Bellow. Her fiction has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, and New Stories from the South, and has appeared in numerous magazines, including One Story, Glimmer Train, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, and The Sun. She is Writer in Residence and professor of English at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and on the faculty of the low-residency MFA Program at Queens University. She holds an MFA from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.