Review: Exactly Where They'd Fall by Laura Rae Amos

Title: Exactly Where They'd Fall
Author: Laura Rae Amos
Format: Ebook
Publisher: Self-published
Publish Date: September 23, 2012
Source: I received a copy from the author; however, this did not affect my review

What's the Story?:

From Goodreads.com: "Jodie and Amelia were almost sisters once, before college degrees, careers, and grown-up love entered their lives. Before Jodie's brother broke up with Amelia.

After so many disappointments, Amelia is finally happy. Or something like it. She's given her love and trust to her best friend, Drew, who is sweet, sensitive, loyal, and everything she's always wanted. She's calculated the perfect path to inner peace and healing by surrounding herself with people who would never break her heart.

Jodie hates that all her friends are pairing up to begin their futures. She hates dating, hates romance in general. She hates that she can't forget one night, a year ago, which Drew doesn't seem to remember the same way. Everyone is moving on without her, but that's fine, because she never needed anyone in her life.

"Never" has a way of proving itself wrong.

With vivid characters, generous doses of humor, and palpable emotion, Exactly Where They'd Fall is a story about three friends forced to explore the complicated and fragile bonds of friendship and love. Fans of heartfelt, witty literary fiction, and smart women's fiction will enjoy this charming and honest debut."

My Two Cents:

"Exactly Where They'd Fall" is a story of friendships and misguided intentions. It's also a story just about commitment in general. It follows a group of loosely tied friends, Amelia, Jodie, and Drew, as they make their ways in and out of love and trying to deal with each other. The story takes place in the present day when the characters are out of college but still not settled down.

The writing in this book is good and is definitely what kept me reading. but I had a lot of trouble with the characters, Jodie in particular but I will get into that later. The writing really pulled me into the story. You get a front row seat to the action throughout the book. Amos does a great job of showing us the world of the characters.

I wanted to understand more about all of their motivations but some of them just seemed to be sort of left blank or unknown. Jodie is definitely a very negative person. Nothing seems to make her happy. She doesn't seem to really care for anyone even though she has others surrounding her. She's downright annoyed with the lot of them. In fact, if the people around her seem the littlest bit happy, she does not seem to hesitate to try to bring them back down to the sort of bad attitude that she herself seems to be feeling. If she were a cartoon, she would have a cloud drawn over her head for the duration of her book. It would be absolutely fine to have this kind of character if I could know why she is the way that she is. All I needed was a motivation.I really wanted to know why she was so angry. Did something happen to her to make her so upset? Was there some former trauma that made her the way that she is? Why does she do something so ugly to Amelia, who had already been hurt by Jodie's brother when he broke up with her and promptly took up with the woman who would become his wife? Amelia seems like a nice person. Is Jodie just unhappy because she sees that Amelia is finally happy and it's too much for Jodie to bear? I don't know. All of that is left unsaid.

I also think that if the reader was able to understand more about the motivation behind the various characters that it would have lent more gravitas to the drama in the book. As it stands, the drama seems to come from nothing. Mountains out of moleholes, if you will.

Bottom line: Good writing will keep you reading this one.