Book Review: Crash

Title: Crash (Visions #1)
Author: Lisa McMann
Publisher: Simon Pulse
Genre: Young Adult // Romance // Supernatural
Format: eBook
Source: Purchased (BN.com)
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 trilogy from New York Times bestselling author Lisa McMann, Jules has to act—and act fast—to keep her vision from becoming reality (goodreads).


I picked up this one high off the adrenalin of Dead To You. Unfortunately Crash was not able to measure up to any other works by Lisa McMann. 

Plot: Crash opens in Chicago with Jules and her family trying to live life as normally as possible while her father suffers from depression. They are the laughing stock of their neighborhood and to make matters worse, Jules sees visions of people dying when she looks at advertisements. Which...is not...normal. The main story had my attention for the first half of the book as I was curious as to why Jules had these visions. Slowly the story turned from this mysterious supernatural to a girl who is OBSESSED with a forbidden boy (think Romeo and Juliet but with pizza) and how to save his life (screw everybody else that might die). I got so bored of the two of them and her stalking of him that I just started flipping pages until I got to the end. Yawn. 

Characters: Jules' family is quite the cast of characters. As they help her run her family's pizza shop, we get a better view of them than anyone else in the story. I loved the connection that Jules had with her siblings and their struggle with their father's mental illness. I actually really like that they brought up mental illness and how Jules worries over "catching" the mental illness which seems to have impacted the lives of her grandfather and father.

 The love story was the weakest for me, mostly because it's infatuation. Jules has been in love with this boy for 8 years and just will not leave him alone. It was stalker level, I swear, and there is NOTHING attractive than someone who won't take no for an answer. 

World Building: It's in Chicago so I love it, although I question whereabouts this takes place in Chicago. Jules and her family have a food truck at Museum Campus (downtown), but live in Melrose Park (a suburb) but somehow go to school with Sawyer who lives in Chicago? Yeah, I don't know. 

Short N Sweet: Crash had an interesting concept but it was bogged down by mediocre love story. 



Labels: , , , ,