Crash (Visions # 1) by Lisa McMann Review

Name: Crash (Visions # 1)

Author: Lisa McMann

Publisher: Simon Pulse

Release Date: January 8th, 2013

Format: E-book
Buy the book on Amazon

256 pages

Summary:
If what you see is what you get, Jules is in serious trouble. The suspenseful first of four books from the New York Times bestselling author of the Wake trilogy.Jules lives with her family above their restaurant, which means she smells like pizza most of the time and drives their double-meatball-shaped food truck to school. It’s not a recipe for popularity, but she can handle that.
What she can’t handle is the recurring vision that haunts her. Over and over, Jules sees a careening truck hit a building and explode...and nine body bags in the snow.
The vision is everywhere—on billboards, television screens, windows—and she’s the only one who sees it. And the more she sees it, the more she sees. The vision is giving her clues, and soon Jules knows what she has to do. Because now she can see the face in one of the body bags, and it’s someone she knows. Someone she has been in love with for as long as she can remember.
In this riveting start to a gripping series from New York Times bestselling author Lisa McMann, Jules has to act—and act fast—to keep her vision from becoming reality.

Goodreads

My Review:

I had very high expectations for this book, and though it was not as excellent as I had hoped (at times, it was just mediocre), I still thought enjoyed reading this fun quick book by Lisa McMann!  Though the setup of the book is very different from her popular Wake series, her brilliant writing style still shines through in this fast-paced read.  I found the plot of this book to be very original.  Although at some points Jules seems to struggle with her own sanity, throughout most of the book she seems to be confident in her assertion that her vision is going to happen; she recognizes that the vision keeps changing as her actions change, and determines that the fate of the nine people in the body bags rests on her own shoulders—on the shoulders of a sixteen-year-old girl.

I really enjoyed the love story that was prevalent through the book.  Jules and Sawyer have a sort of Romeo and Juliet love: their families are rival pizza companies, which began when Sawyer's family stole the secret sauce recipe that Jules's family had originally created.  Now, while Sawyer's family's restaurant is thriving and loved by the entire town, Jules's family is struggling majorly, especially with her father's depression.  While this rivalry seems a little bit ridiculous (I mean, really?  That much angst over a sauce recipe?), McMann really makes it work.  Besides the fact that Jules and Sawyer act so much better when they are together, it is also nice to read a book where the two main characters are not kept apart because of some supernatural aspect, but for an actual reason that could occur in anybody's lives (well, anybody who owns a pizza restaurant, that is).

One thing that I wish McMann had expanded upon, however, was Jules's life at school.  Although she makes it clear that most of the other kids bully her for being antisocial and smelling like pizza, it seems as though something else must have happened between Jules and the other girls for them to be that mean to her.  It also would have been nice to see more about Jules's brother, Trey; he was definitely one of the most interesting characters in the book, and a look more into his life would have been greatly appreciated.  However, I still love the direct storytelling nature of McMann's writing, and her cliffhanger at the end of the book was very well created.  Overall, I enjoyed reading this quick book, and cannot wait to pick up the sequel when it comes out in October!

My Rating: