Still, Zhang’s age is key to what makes Falling Into Place work so well. A teenager herself, Zhang was intimately, actively engaged with the teenage experience — the range of full-throttle emotion, the climbing of social ladders that lead to nowhere. She thus makes Liz, an existentially frustrated queen bee, and her friends come to life with authenticity. These are mean girls, as only someone who knew mean girls intimately could design them. When Liz becomes frustrated with the torrents of high school drama (and her own behavior), she deliberately crashes her car in a failed suicide attempt. The rest of the novel switches between Liz’s coma in the hospital and the tense lead-up to the accident in the characters’ lives.