Where We Fall: A Novel

Written by Rochelle B. Weinstein

Narrated by Kate Rudd, Whitney Dykhouse, Tanya Eby and Scott Merriman

By all accounts, Abby Holden has it all. She’s the mother of a beautiful teenager and the wife of a beloved high school football coach. And all it took to achieve her charmed life was her greatest act of betrayal.

Coach Ryan can coax his team to victory, but he can’t seem to make his wife, Abby, happy. Her struggles with depression have marred their marriage and taken a toll on their daughter, Juliana. Although this isn’t the life he’s dreamed of, he’s determined to heal the rifts in his family.

Chasing waterfalls and documenting their beauty has led photographer Lauren Sheppard all around the world. Now it has brought her back home to the mountains of North Carolina—back to the scene of her devastating heartbreak.

For the first time in seventeen years, a trio of once-inseparable friends find themselves confronting past loves, hurts, and the rapid rush of a current that still pulls them together…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brilliance Audio
• Release date: Apr 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781511365857

Rochelle B. Weinstein

Rochelle B. Weinstein is the USA Today and Amazon bestselling author of emotionally driven women’s fiction, including This Is Not How It Ends, Somebody’s Daughter, Where We Fall, The Mourning After, and What We Leave Behind. Rochelle spent her early years, always with a book in hand, raised by the likes of Sidney Sheldon and Judy Blume. A former entertainment industry executive, she splits her time between sunny South Florida and the mountains of North Carolina. When she’s not writing, Rochelle can be found hiking, reading, and searching for the world’s best nachos. She is currently working on her seventh novel. Please visit her at www.rochelleweinstein.com.

Reviews for Where We Fall

[gentlespirit512 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I'm going to attempt to review this, but I don't know if I can sort out my reactions yet.

Some other reviewers mentioned not being able to tell the voices of the characters apart. This is a valid criticism, because I caught myself confused in the beginning. I had to remember to pay attention to chapter headings that specified who was narrating that part of the story until I got used to it.

The voices were hard to distinguish, but they were absolutely beautiful. I don't use the word "lyrical" to describe language very often for fiction, but the prose just sang. This is why I can't complain about the way the story was told. The story flowed so poetically that I was swept away with it.

The mountain settings in Western North Carolina are so dear to my heart, and Rochelle described them so that I felt as if I were in the places as she was telling the story.

Now, how did I feel about the story? That's where I get verklempt. Abby's struggle with her depression was depicted in such a real way that I could reach out and touch it. I could feel it. And I've experienced depression so deep I couldn't sleep at night and didn't want to get out of bed in the morning. Considering the depth of the guilt she carried for so many years, I'm surprised she remained as functional as she did for as long as she did. I have a great deal of sympathy for her, even though she was in some ways, the villain of the piece.

Ryan and Juliana brilliantly depicted how mental illness affects the family. Even though there was much more going on than mental illness in that family, I appreciated Juliana's wariness with her mother during and after treatment. Ryan was ready to accept her new self, until Abby told him the one thing that could make him leave her. It wasn't that she had betrayed him. It was that she wanted to make it right again.

The ending was a bit neat, but not so much that I couldn't foresee the loose ends hanging as everyone learned to live their new lives. There was a question in the study guide that asked (paraphrased), "If you could write another chapter, how do you see the characters continuing?" I love that it wasn't completely clear, yet there was a happy ending that worked for everyone.

[whitreidtan · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Anxiety and depression can be debilitating. They suck the marrow out of life. But it's not just the person suffering from these illnesses who suffers, it is everyone around them who loves and cares for them. These twin demons make it impossible for a person to have the sort of relationships they want or to live fully. They are incredibly damaging. Rochelle Weinstein's newest novel, Where We Fall, addresses the cost of these illnesses and how facing up to them and finding help to fight against them can change the future for everyone.Abby and Lauren are best friends and college roommates. Lauren and Ryan are soulmates and deeply in love. They've never had a problem including Abby in their warmth and happiness, so secure are they in their couplehood. But when Lauren leaves after graduation for a six month course taking photographs of waterfalls around the world instead of staying with Ryan, something changes. Flash forward seventeen years. Ryan and Abby are married with a daughter. Ryan is a successful high school coach, revered by the mostly disadvantaged boys he coaches to glory. Abby is a prisoner of her anxiety and depression, holding tight to a secret she's never revealed to Ryan, suffering in the depths of her own self-hatred. And Juliana is a self-sufficient teenager in love with her dad's star player, a boy whose father and older brothers are serious criminals. Lauren is a best selling author who writes romances under a pseudonym and she's finally coming back to North Carolina to face the painful past she's still holding in her heart.Ryan's team is making a run for States just as Abby breaks down badly and agrees to be admitted to a residential mental health hospital in the mountains. As if worrying about his wife isn't enough, EJ, the star of the team and Juliana's boyfriend, flees from the police, who want to question him about a major theft, and Lauren is about to reappear in his life. Abby has a lot of hard work and introspection in front of her in her program and she must look at her relationship with Ryan and the truth of their history, her love for Juliana and the ways she's been an absent mother, and how she betrayed her best friend so many years ago. Fixing all of the things wrong in her life, including her own reactions and feelings and teasing out the difference between love and loyalty, won't be easy.The novel is told in first person by the four major characters: Abby, Ryan, Juliana, and Lauren. Each of them shares their innermost feelings and desires as they tell their stories, present and past. None of them have distinctive voices though, making each section sound the same. And to be honest, I didn't much like any of them so spending so much time in their heads was not rewarding. The prose was excessively wordy and it didn't help that the obligation felt by the characters extended to the reader. They built lives out of obligation, I finished the book out of the same. Often set in Charlotte, NC, the city as described does not feel like the Charlotte I live in at all. And the idea that Ryan and Lauren still love each other so deeply and purely after seventeen years, without taking into consideration how their experiences and life has changed them rings false. The parallel of young intense, forever love between Ryan and Lauren and between Juliana and EJ is a bit heavy handed and quite honestly, the high school love story wasn't all that engaging to me. Weinstein has drawn an intensely introspective and psychological portrait of the way in which one family member's mental illness takes over and forms each person in the family combined with the story of soul mates and an all encompassing love but the major halves of the story exist together a bit uneasily. And the martyrdom of the ending, although by all rights it could not have ended any other way, was the capper on a story I was already struggling with. Many other people seem to have really been touched by this novel so readers who appreciate troubled family tales, stories of the impact of mental illness, or novels about truth and lies and friendship should read it and make up their own minds.

[hfineisen · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is one of those books I read in almost one sitting. The story is riveting and Weinstein tackles an important subject with the focus on depression and mental illness. The attention paid to the manifestation and treatment was thorough and heartbreaking. The descriptions are so life-like, I felt like I was there in the book's various settings: At the mental hospital, the football game or the fall festival. There is a scene at an art booth that is written so well I felt as if I was there eavesdropping on the characters' conversation. The story is told from alternating viewpoints from past to present which added an air of mystery as there is a slow reveal of what happened with the love triangle. The characters all suffer from being human and at times may have done something unlikable, but Weinstein still manages to make them relatable and therefore forgivable. There are some coincidences that may stretch the reader's belief in timing but overall the novel is well done and worth the read. I'll be checking out Weinstein's other work.Provided by publisher and TLC Book Tours