Book review: Crash (Visions book one) by Lisa McMann

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 vision.

Over and over, Jules sees a careening truck hit a building and explode… and nine body bags in the snow. 

She has no idea why this is happening to her or if she’s going crazy.  It hardly matters, because the vision is everywhere—on billboards, television screens, windows—and she’s the only one who can see it.

But it’s not until the vision starts coming more frequently, and revealing more clues, that 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’s been in love with for as long as she can remember.

Another library book, one I’ve had the pleasure of being the first to check out.  As you can see it’s part of a series, and the ending, which I won’t reveal for obvious reasons involving spoilers, does make that fact clear.

Overall it was a great book.  Jules is a compelling main character with quirks that fit in without being harped on and overly-explained to the point that you think the author is proud of thinking of them.  She makes little lists of five, such as “Five Reasons I, Jules Demarco, Am Shunned” and says “Oh my dog” instead of “Oh my god” (the last one, likely, is because her parents are devout Catholics and would probably wash her mouth out with soap if they heard her taking the lord’s name in vain).

A weakness is that it’s never really explained why no one likes Jules at school—the pizza rivalry is an obvious answer, but there’s really no evidence that it effects anyone but the families, besides the one instance where Angotti’s is closed and Jules’ classmates complain that they’d rather eat there.  Some details like that aren’t really shown rather than told; to give another example, the fact that Jules’ brother, Trey, is made fun of at school for being gay. In that same scene, Jules tells him to stay in the kitchen so “the bigots” won’t make him upset, but for how close Jules and Trey are, there really isn’t an instance of him having a hard time because of his sexuality, something I’m sure Jules would know about if it happened.

The most unique and compelling part of the book, though, would definitely be the main plot: the vision.  It isn’t the typical delivery of visions, where she just sees it in her mind.  She sees it everywhere, on every TV and reflective surface (and any surface, near the end).  It, admittedly, did drive me a little crazy near the end because it was so frequent and Jules was seeing them everywhere.  It was simply a way of whatever causes the visions to tell her that she wasn’t solving things right, but Ms. McMann probably could have stood to handle it a little less… annoyingly.

Still, it was a good book, and definitely worth it to pick up and follow the series, when the next one comes out.  It’s also a quick read; at just over 200 pages, I finished it in less than a day.  I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be a trilogy or a full-blown series, but I look forward to seeing it flourish.