Free to Fall

What I Liked:
Free to Fall takes place 20 years in the future. The world’s not all that different. Apple has been replaced in cell phone dominance by a company called Gnosis, most famous for their Lux App. Lux does Siri one better. Lux doesn’t just look things up for you; Lux will tell you what to do. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m a really indecisive person a lot of the time. Which movie should I watch? What book should I read? Should I go out to a bar with my friends or stay home and practice the hermit lifestyle? There have been times where I wished someone or something would make these choices for me, to spare me all the time spent mulling and fretting over choices. That is what Lux does.

Needless to say, Lux is really popular, and almost everyone has a Gnosis handheld. People live guided by Lux, and their lives are bettered for that. If you listen to Lux, you’ll maintain a healthy diet and make safe, non-destructive choices. Rory (short for Aurora) trusts Lux much more than herself, and worries about her best friend Beck, an artist, who refuses to use the app, preferring to follow The Doubt.

The Doubt is a little hard to quantify, something like intuition or conscience but possibly coming from something else. That point’s not really settled. In Rory’s day, this internal voice is called The Doubt and it’s been classified as a mental disorder. Listening to Lux and keeping the brain active should prevent The Doubt from speaking up. The foundation of Free to Fall deals with these two voices and the question of what they are and which to trust.

Free to Fall is very plot-heavy. There’s romance, a sweet if not for me swoony one, but Miller’s first focus is on the actual story. 470 pages went by pretty quickly, full of intellectual puzzles and tough ethical questions. It’s very nerd-fascinating. Nerdinating? Anyway, the characters are all brilliant. Rory, for example, recited the Fibonacci sequence to fall asleep. There were a couple of instances where Rory didn’t put together obvious things as quickly as I did, but they were mostly related to relationships with people. She rocks class.

The plot follows pretty predictable lines, but I think Miller did it very well. The characters seem more prepared than YA heroes and heroines often do. They plan, they think things through, and they put survival above kissing. Also, I love that Free to Fall isn’t anti-technology, but does recommend consideration of how much we let technology rule our lives.

What Left Me Wanting More:
The only drawback for me was that there wasn’t as much focus on characterization as I like in my books. Rory’s great and North is a fabulously unique love interest. Hershey, Rory’s roommate, has an amazing character arc. Otherwise, though, I think a lot of the characters get dropped as the plot picks up. I loved Rory’s friendship with Beck at the beginning, but he becomes a sidenote. Even Hershey sort of drops off the map. Though the romance doesn’t overwhelm the plot, the focus does narrow to just Rory and North, making me feel like other characters didn’t get fitting endings or were written off entirely.

The Final Verdict:
Miller’s Free to Fall imagines a world where our phones can make choices for us, a frighteningly believable and tempting conception. It’s a surprisingly quick read for almost five hundred pages, and I definitely want more Lauren Miller novels.