Book Review: I Let You Fall by Sara Downing

I received an Advance e-Copy of this book from TCK Publishing in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own. Pubdate was

Eve Chapman finds herself in the hospital, watching surgeons operate on her own inanimate body. After a sudden accident, Eve ends up in a coma. But her spirit (or her soul maybe) is very much alive, dwelling near her body in the hospital room, witnessing everything happening around her. Eve can see her distraught parents come to visit and her beloved boyfriend. But she can’t communicate with them or do anything to help herself. The only person she can make contact with turns out to be another coma patient, a man named Luca. Luca has been in a coma for a while longer so has been able to develop his capabilities and now shows Eve what they can do. Unseen by those around them, they are still able to offer comfort to the bereaved and suffering in the hospital and perhaps make small changes. But Luca also has some secrets that he is keeping from Eve and their destinies are more linked than Eve knows.

I’m always intrigued with portrayals of the afterlife or what might be all around us that we are unaware of. I Let You Fall doesn’t portray what I believe about life after death or the supernatural but it isn’t really trying to be a statement about the meaning of life or death. It would probably best be classified as a romance. As such, I found the story pretty predictable. I don’t think I’ve given too much away but I think you can probably guess where this is all going. There are other characters and elements, including a young boy waiting for a kidney transplant, and nothing about the book’s conclusion surprised me.

There is a nice message here about helping others and the true impact of our lives but I don’t really read fiction for its moral messages. The main problem I found is that Eve, our main character and focus, is too flat a character to be truly invested in. There just isn’t enough here for her to feel like a real person. She’s a teacher, she has a longterm relationship with her boyfriend, she seems kind enough. The point is, I guess that she’s an ordinary person in an extraordinary situation and what will she do with what’s been given her but she has no depth of feeling. The whole situation and all the characters feel too black-and-white. The one bad character is cartoonishly unpleasant and the other negative events that occur to the characters are portrayed without nuance with a very black-and-white morality to them.

Overall, I liked the idea here but the execution didn’t work for me.

You can find out more about TCK Publishing here and visit Sara Downing’s website here.