Double Take: Falling by TJ Newman

This month's Double Take re-along was TJ Newman's debut novel ' Falling ' so grab your popcorn and hang on for the ride...

GOODREADS SUMMARY

You just boarded a flight to New York.

There are one hundred and forty-three other passengers onboard.

What you don’t know is that thirty minutes before the flight your pilot’s family was kidnapped.

For his family to live, everyone on your plane must die.

The only way the family will survive is if the pilot follows his orders and crashes the plane.

Enjoy the flight.

TEE'S THOUGHTS

OK, I was hooked the moment I read the back of the book when I was sent it from the publishers. I am a sucker for a good disaster movie. When I was a child, I would watch them every time they were on TV, airplanes crashing, freeways having 100 car pile-ups, asteroids hitting the earth. If it had disaster written on it I was in!

Falling the debut novel by TJ Newman gave me the exact rush that those TV shows did. It was a sit on the edge of your seat, bite your fingernails, fast-paced suspense-filled thriller that I started reading and only put down when I absolutely had to.

As I read this book, I had a hard time imagining that this was Newman's debut novel. She has outdone herself. I only hope she does not peak with this one. I worked in the music business for years and saw many a young band hit the scene with this wonderous debut album, only to lose steam on their Sophomore release. It's the pressure to improve. It is easier to build up to that top-level than to come out running into it. Time will tell, but I hope she can keep it up because I will be one that will go straight to her second one.

Falling pulls you in and keeps you hanging on your seat, you will find yourself holding your breath at times as you turn the pages, waiting to see what is going to happen next. It is intense, there is a person on board who is part of the hijacking and you do not know who it is. You suspect everyone, because of the way the author has written the book, no one is off-limits on being the informant. ( I totally did not get that one right LOL.)

While the characters in the book will leave you guessing, they each have an important part in the story, and they all have the depth to them. They are given tasks and responsibilities that none of us would want to take on. Jo, the air hostess is a strong and determined woman, and Bill the pilot refuses to back down to the terrorists. They are great main characters, and Jo has a great storyline of helping guide her nephew, who is a bit of a reckless police person on the ground find the pilot family before time runs out and they are killed.

The story takes place mostly in the air, of course, it is a plane hijacking story, but plenty also goes on down below with the police and Bill's family. The reader is privy to information from the cockpit that the rest of the crew and the police are not, and vice versa. This limited knowledge does cause some great tense moments at times.

Toward the end of the book when we find out the reasoning for the hijacking, I found it a bit far-fetched, but then I thought about it and asked myself if it was really. Terrorists never seem to have a legitimate reason for doing the things they do. I have never once thought " Oh yeah I can see why they did that"

 when we find out reasons if we ever do.

I can imagine, if they haven't already, that the networks will come knocking for a chance to make this into a movie, and I imagine if that happens that I will have my big tub of buttered popcorn sitting in the front row!

Hmmm, I really don’t know what to say to this. 

I was definitely hooked at the beginning. It pulls you in with a lot of uncertainties. I was engrossed with finding out why anyone would take a pilot's family hostage. But it lost me somewhere in the middle. I couldn’t really grasp the reason for the kidnapping. It came across like a half-ass ploy and a very desperate attempt for an interesting plot. It really really just fell short for me. I began to lose interest in the story once the ploy for the kidnapping was revealed. And around that point, it also became very dramatized. Like big over-the-top stuff and somewhat forced. Like she put it in there so it could be picked up as a movie and keep the audience captive. Which in fact if it was a movie I’d watch it and probably like it. For all the action packs. 

So, in Short, didn’t care for it as a book but would probably enjoy it as a movie.