by Jandy Nelson ★★★★☆
When the World Tips Over introduces us to the fictional Fall family. We start in current times, with a single mother, Bernadette Fall, raising three teenagers, after her husband Theo abruptly left more than a dozen years ago, never to be heard from again. Her eldest child, Wynton, is a challenge: he's a violin virtuoso, but has spent time in juvie and is regularly in trouble. Her middle child, Miles, is the opposite: nicknamed "Perfect Miles", he's an A-student, a successful athlete, and stunningly attractive. Dizzy is Bernadette's 12-year-old fireplug daughter and rounds out the immediate family.
Even after more than a decade, all of the Falls are reeling in different ways from the continued absence of their husband/father. Bernadette tries to fill the Theo-shaped hole in her life by making him a plate of food in her restaurant every night, hoping he might show up. Wynton obsesses over his violin playing, reasoning that if he gets good enough, his father will hear about it and come back. Miles still sleeps each night with his father's trumpet, and Dizzy still pines for a man she never got to know, with Theo having left while she was still in utero.
The story follows the family, and chapters alternate from each of their points of view. The kids each have an encounter with a mysterious "rainbow-haired girl". This girl saves Dizzy from being hit by a truck, and Dizzy is convinced the rainbow-haired girl is an actual angel. Miles and the girl spend an afternoon together, and their connection is immediate and intense, but not romantic. Wynton is the one Fall to meet the girl multiple times -- once when he was 13, and they shared an afternoon together when she was in distress, and later in the timeline of the story when he's 19, after she finds him following a violin performance.
When tragedy strikes the family, the story revolves around how the Falls deal with that, and secrets begin to be revealed about their current family and their ancestors. Author Jandy Nelson does a nice job of lightly sprinkling in cross-generational themes and conditions across the family tree of the Falls—history does indeed repeat itself. We begin to learn more about the rainbow-haired girl as well. There is a just-under-the-surface mystical element to the story —the maybe-angel who keeps entering the Falls' lives; ancestors who can float, fly or glow; one character who grows into a giant; humans that can talk with dogs; and characters who seem to posses magical gifts when it comes to their musicianship or winemaking.
It's an interesting mix, and one that I thought I'd connect with a bit more than I did. It's partly a love story, partly a coming-of-age story, and partly about forgiveness and second chances. There's a lot that works in it, but there were some components that didn't fully land with me. There are several different relationships that play out, most notably in two batches: people falling in love, and parents with their children. Across that spectrum, I found those relationships to be everything from really poignantly rendered to clunky at times. Perhaps those that didn't quite work were a bit too "young-adulty" or naive for me, but that's generally not something that I find fault with when reading. There was a running theme of one-directional crushes (that maybe in some cases were bi-directional, unbeknownst to one or both parties), and that started to feel redundant.
Despite some clunkiness, When the World Tips Over is mostly good. The gradual reveal of the Fall family tree, the identity/origin of the rainbow-haired girl, and the ultimate connection of several storylines was nicely executed. It's fairly long at 520 pages, but over the course of that journey Nelson keeps the reader intrigued with an ongoing list of open questions that aren't all answered until close to the novel's conclusion. Perhaps it was that I was reading it during the holiday season, but if this was made into a film, I can see it being a Hallmark movie or even something like Love Actually. The title of the novel comes from a quote in the book: "when the world tips over, joy spills out with all the sorrow", and that fairly accurately sums up the highs and lows of what is mostly an uplifting tale. It's not a must-read that I'll be recommending to everyone, but I was generally satisfied.
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