REVIEW: ALL FALL DOWN, BY JENNIFER WEINER

 

 

 

 

From the outside, Allison Weiss’s world looks perfect. She and her husband Dave live in an upscale suburb near Philadelphia with their six-year-old daughter Ellie, and both have interesting work. His, at The Examiner, and hers as a popular blogger whose posts about family, relationships, and sexual issues bring numerous hits…and money. Nowadays, Allison’s job brings in more money than Dave’s.

But Allison finds it more and more difficult to manage her life, and Ellie’s behavior is increasingly frustrating most of the time. She has difficulty keeping all those balls in the air, and Dave does little to help. Most of the time he seems to escape the home for one marathon or another.

The pills Allison takes, the ones left over from her C-section and from a herniated disc, are just to help smooth out the edges. But when life keeps throwing those troubling curves, Allison finds herself constantly on a quest for pills and spending a lot of time in search of more pills.

What will happen to turn Allison’s “perfect” world on end? What will she stand to lose if she does not accept that she needs help?

All Fall Down: A Novel is an engaging story of one woman’s spiral downward into dangerous addiction and the slow climb back up out of the chasm, one day at a time.

The story is told in Allison’s first person narrative, so the reader gets an insider’s view of how her world looks to her through the cloud of denial and the dawning light of a new day as she experiences the gradual acceptance of her condition.

Dave was a remote, detached character, but perhaps only because we see him through Allison’s point of view. Ellie was also the kind of child many parents might want to scream at, but again…Allison’s view of her world and her problematic child were definitely tainted by her own perspective.

I could not put this book down. It felt realistic and troubling, a cautionary tale of what can happen when women bury their feelings and struggle to “do it all.” 5.0 stars.