Chekhov said, "If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there."

Well I waited until page 244 for the gun to even got cocked, and by the end of the 357 page book, the gun never went off.

I settled in for what the cover promised me -- a story about two sisters, once inseparable and now unable to be in the same room as each other after the car crash that neither of them remembers being in. What I got was a mess of unrealistic characters and flowery prose that was meant to disguise 244 pages of navel gazing before the "thriller" aspects began, and a conclusion that nearly made me chuck the book off my balcony because it was so unrelated to every page before and so unbearably frustrating. I think I have to give up on my hope that Oliver would write another book as stunning as Before I Fall.