During her senior year of high school, she goes on a slew of miserable dates, set up by her mother and her own second-best–friend–turned-matchmaker, Lillian Hooker. Sally Spitz is a frizzy-haired 17-year-old girl with a charming zeal for three things: Harry Potter (she’s a Gryffindor), Star Wars, and getting into Duke University. In O’Gorman’s YA debut, two best friends try to fool people into thinking that they’re in love-and then discover a new facet of their relationship. Suspenseful and romantic, if often overwrought. Still, the characterization is thoughtful throughout, and Bernard makes good use of setting to help ground the story. Although the stressful situation (and a final twist) help to justify it, the adolescent melodrama can sometimes feel over the top: a high school breakup means “We were ruined” news from Alton makes Grace feel “like I was going to shiver into a thousand pieces.” The love triangle plotline is also nothing new, nor are Grace’s fairly standard failings, such as shyness, clumsiness, and an inability to believe that the cute boy likes her. Bernard ( Trust Me, 2017, etc.) writes capably from Grace’s overheated, first-person perspective, using highly somatized emotions to prove the heroine’s turmoil: knotted stomach, crawling skin, chills, a tight chest, nausea, clenched teeth. She has only days to prevent Ander’s murder, stop Finn, and-she hopes-stop Falling. But on this 42nd wake-up, something’s different: Ander doesn’t remember what’s happening, and other strange things make Grace question her sanity. Before the first Fall, Grace, Jem, and Ander had been an inseparable trio since childhood, but their closeness was threatened by a few problems: Ander’s drinking, which was worrisomely like his father’s Grace’s possible acceptance at Alton Preparatory for her senior year, which would have taken her away from Boone and Finn’s irresistible beauty and arrogance. Despite their pleas, all Finn says is “We all have to pay for what we did”-whatever that means. These three alone recognize the pattern, and no matter how the couple tries to avoid it, Finn always ends up killing Ander. After waking from each “Fall,” as she terms it, Grace has five disorienting days before she and her boyfriend, Ander Hale, are chased down by another teenager, Finn. For example, sometimes her twin brother, Jem, is alive, sometimes not. On each occasion, she’s found herself in a different timeline-or perhaps an alternate universe-with many altered details.

Grace Freeman, 17, of the town of Boone, Georgia, has died 41 times and woken up 42. In this YA paranormal romance, a teenage girl tries to escape a recurring, five-day time loop that always ends with her boyfriend’s murder.

Trust me romily bernard