Falling From The Sky
I had a bad streak before reading this book and was looking for something awesome to save the day. I found this book instead.
With that, Micah unwraps a stick of blue rock candy and proceeds to seductively pull it in and out of his mouth. I guess he assumes he’s in the clear to practice blow jobs in public with me now. I can’t watch.
I loved the first half but in some moment in the way it lost heart. It’s not that it goes from bad to worse, it’s just I expected it to go from good to better, and that didn’t happen.
”I knew you could do it,” Micah teases me from across the table. “Is it terrible?”
I shake my head, but I hold back on telling him that there’s no one else in the world I’d have done that for. Instead, I say, “I’m braver than you think.”
And I only say that because I’m too scared to tell him the truth.
Ridge is a teenager whose father died in a plane crash. Since then he can’t help himself from praying when he sees a plane flying in the sky, thinking that it will fall from the sky.
”Where should we go?” Micah, asks me.
I shrug my shoulders. “It’d have to be a road trip”, I say.
“Why’s that?” he asks.
“Because you’ll never get on a ship and I’m sure as hell never getting on a plane.”
Lately everything feels like that, like falling from the sky. His relationship with his mother grows more distant everyday. His brother wishes to be an only child. His girlfriend doesn’t break up with him because it would give her a bad reputation about abandoning the poor guy in the worst moment of his life. Everything is useless and uncomfortable, so when summer comes, he decides to go to a basketball camp, but with no alcohol, no girls and no stupid friends.
"We have to go, zombie boy," I say.
He smiles. "I'll have you converted before the summer's over. Don't worry."
What’s left?
The guy at the carousel.
Until Micah, no one could handle me. But Micah gets me. And I get him.
Micah talks too fast. Ridge doesn’t keep up with him. Micah talks too much. Ridge barely utters a word. Micah says the horses in the carousel are not usual, behind every one of then a story is hidden, waiting to be told. Ridge is too polite to interrupt Micah’s advances and, before he realizes it, Ridge has a new friend. Micah makes his place in Ridge’s life from one night to the next before Ridge has time to regret it.
Micah leans closer. His hair brushes against my face before he whispers directly into my ear, “Fight or bite? What do you want, Ridge? Fight… or…”
“Bite me!” The words fly from my lips faster than I can even think to stop them.
But I can’t think of the words or the morgue or anything other than the piercing pain that shoots through my collarbone.
“Fuck! Micah!” I scream.
This story is refreshing and cute in an innocent way. But this is deceiving, because we find the big conflicts also the adults have to confront, like bigotry, hate, fake couples, self-discovery, dysfunctional families, small and important traumas, past and present pains and personality problems. The world is not a welcoming place, and they have to deal with lies, half-truths and falseness, above all in themselves. Micah is not telling the whole truth, and Ridge tells too many lies.
He takes two side steps closer to me. “Are you really that scared?”
What the hell do you think, Micah? Yeah, I’m really that scared. That’s why I’m standing on the wrong side of a bridge’s railing holding the hand of a guy who likes guys, and all the while, that elephant named Tension is behind us poking at me with its trunk waiting for me to take a leap of faith… in more ways than one.
I loved the writing and the MC are very well defined. It it curious because everything is painted like normal, even though there are some facts that are not. The good parts and the bad parts are just that, parts. There was no critizism in the narrator’s voice, in Ridge’s voice. It’s strange because he knows when he is behaving in a dubious way and recriminates himself, but I couldn’t shake the feeling he was narrating other person’s life. Maybe it’s due to his cold behavior during the book. People are not like that, people don’t have that much time to think things through, but it seemed like he had, and that didn’t feel real or natural. In any case, I liked his voice, apart from that weird sensation I could get myself into the story and into Ridge’s head.
He runs his fingers through the hair that’s fallen on the back of my back. I shiver – not an “I’m cold” sort of shiver but more of the “Hey, that feels, good, and you’re kind of turning me on” sort of shiver.
Micah is less transparent, I think it would be interesting to get to know his limits as a person, because I was a little disappointed to know so little of him. They don’t talk that much, most of the time they play the X-Box and that looks like boring but it’s not.
All in all, I enjoyed the book, it's easy and fast to read, and there are not great adventures or real angst. The twists and turns are not very marked, instead they are soft and quiet, but in a endearing way.
”And what do you want, McCoy?” Terrence asks. “Really and truly?”
“For this summer to never end.”
