FALLING UNDER by Danielle Younge-Ullman—2015

My first encounter with Falling Under was in 2011. Mara Foster’s journey hit me the way Wylie Coyote gets hit with an anvil. You can read my awestruck review here.  I stand by each word but after a second reading I want to zero in on the specifics that have made me a fan of Danielle Younge-Ullman.

In addition to simply loving the story I chose to reread Falling Under because I’m currently wrestling with a broken and flawed protagonist in my own novel. I also wanted to take a closer look at a second person narrative (Mara remembers her past through this POV), for the new story I’m writing. Benefits were gained on both counts and I received a bonus. Prior to picking up Falling Under I agreed to read a novel about the holocaust with a friend for discussion. From the first page I struggled to engage with the story and the protagonist. By the time I finished, my frustration was so huge I seriously contemplated giving up reading any new books until my own manuscript was done.

Then the next night I snuggled up with my reading restlessness and Falling Under.

Ask Santa for a new bike, and you might get it. But Daddy might leave on Christmas Day.

I was instantly transported out of my reading funk and completely engaged with a little girl whose name had yet to be uttered. Danielle Younge-Ullman’s writing flows with a dynamic crunch. She makes you hungry for every detail of Mara Foster’s car-wreck-of-a-life. And each detail is delivered with raw honesty and twisted with a sad humor that screams of this character’s emotional imbalance.

You are fourteen and nobody fucks with you anymore. Your best friend is awesome, you can drink without puking your guts out, and your mother has a Master’s degree.

Mara Foster has more than a few issues and yet I’d like to be her, personally experience her journey because I know the transformation will be phenomenal—these were my thoughts when I was only sixty-nine pages in. This is how well Younge-Ullman delivers a flawed protagonist. But Mara is more than her broken self. She is an artist, determined to succeed and her passion oozes into us, like when she sees the work of her mentor.

It’s not her fault she doesn’t feel the longing, the tug, the absolute YES that ricochets through you when you see something so wild and beautiful. You will never be this good, but now you have to spend your life trying.

But while Mara’s passion bubbles and transforms the reader never loses contact with the emotional turmoil in her life. Every relationship is a double-edged sword magnified through her artistic sensitivity.

Huge love floods you and you want to leap out of your chair and into her arms. […] And love is what you see in her eyes too, and a need as huge as your own. Then her face changes. Out goes the love and in comes the face that could freeze oceans, the voice that is like a whip cracking.

Mara’s relationship with her mother is one of the most painful and accurate depictions I have ever come across in literature. The push and pull between them rings with such truth you want to yell at them as much as you want to hug them.

What I covet most about Falling Under, other than the beautiful, conflicted mess of Mara Foster is the simplicity Younge-Ullman uses to deliver the story. Again and again she sticks to the facts.

I fall asleep with Erik in my skin and Hugo on my mind. 

Nothing like fearing something inside to get me outside.

The exposure of truth without fuss ignites the reader’s imagination and emotions rise while conflict is underscored. Then when the time is ripe, when the reader least expects it, Younge-Ullman grips tight to the facts and dives deeper to the core of Mara’s fears.

You rip the condom open yourself, put it on him and then slide yourself down until he is so deep it hurts. You like the hurt, you pull the hurt into you, hold it close, and let it simmer and ache up and down your spine and into that place where your soul must be. 

Mara’s honesty, her insistence on taking responsibility for her actions allows us to accept behavior we otherwise might not tolerate. We root for her because we know from the moment we meet her on Christmas Day that she deserves better.

Falling Under deals with pain and loss, and the courage needed to move through fear in order to breathe into life.