Brady, the younger Wilson sister by a whole eleven months, is known for her artsy ways. Sabine, her older sister, is perfect. She's a cheerleader. She's part of a power couple. Everyone loves her. And then she dies in a freak cheering accident. Everyone blames Connor, Sabine's stunt partner, for failing to catch her. He did fail a drug test that day, after all. But Brady doesn't quite buy it. She wants to get to the bottom of this whole death thing so she can move on with her life.

Let's just get one thing straight. From the very first mention of Sabine, I didn't trust her. Nobody is that perfect. It's hard to sympathize with a family, no, an entire community, losing its star when you don't believe that star was who she pretended to be. I'm not sure whether I was supposed to like or dislike Sabine. I'm not actually sure how I was supposed to feel about most of the characters.

So, the good. Suzy Vitello handles the grief of the family very well. Dad starts drinking too much and pushes his family away. Mom gets all secretive. Is she having an affair? Brady, formerly a good student (or that's what I got out of it, at least), begins neglecting her studies. Everything falls apart.

The indifferent. I both liked and disliked Brady's relationship with Connor. Why did it have to happen so quickly? One minute Brady hated him with a fiery passion, and the next she was falling all over him. They made a cute (though weird) couple, but was the relationship really necessary? Did it add anything to the story? Aside from injecting some romance when the plot slowed down, not really.

And the bad. For a book of a mere 200-ish pages, there is an awful lot going on. Every character has at least two or three side plots in addition to the main dead Sabine thing. I couldn't bring myself to care about whether Martha, the girls' best friend, won her pageant thing. The whole art award nonsense was never really resolved. Sabine's secret drama/trauma doesn't really go anywhere. The teachers ask the right questions but never follow up. And then there were the weird references to St. Agatha and moths. While The Moment Before started out with a good premise, I feel like the author tried to tackle too many ideas.

In the end, I really can't give it more than two stars. Maybe, had the plot been more focused and the characters been more relatable, I could give it three or four. The premise was good, as I said. There was just so much going on that no single plot, including the main one, got the attention it deserved.

In the interest of full disclosure: I received a free copy of The Moment Before from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. ( )

What a great book! The magic of Brady (the main character) was that virtually every reader could find some aspect of her life that they could identify with, whether it be that they also lost someone, or were just trying to figure out who they were as a person while navigating their way through the hallways of their high school.

It was also very refreshing to read a YA novel that was more internal than some other YA that comes to mind. There were no vampires, werewolves, or magical powers...just a teenager trying to live her life under terrible circumstances. There's nothing wrong with fantasy stories, but it's nice to also see a book that found it's adventure in an extremely well-developed character.

There's a place for both. ( )

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this small volume. The author has accurately captured the high school years, the angst, the phony characters you meet in your teenage years, the struggle to be loved and learn about love. We have a glimpse of the games and lies young people try in order to be in the "in" crowd. I heartily recommend this for parents and their YA readers to share and open up a conversation about what really matters at this time in their lives. My thanks to the author and LibraryThing for a complimentary copy. ( )

Due to copy and paste, formatting has been lost.

I'm going to jump right into The Moment Before. It's been a few days (between the reading and this writing), but I'm still kind of unsure about what I think. To be honest, I'm more unsure than ever about it. I kind of feel like it could have been a little better, but I definitely didn't hate it. I just didn't love it.

I liked Brady. She was kind of angry at the world, kind of just getting used to no longer being the younger sister of the popular girl. She did some things that made me like her, but she also did lots of things that upset me. I think that my biggest problem with her overall was that she didn't exactly stand up for herself all the time. Sometimes she just let things happen, and I just wanted her to be stronger than that.

But sometimes she just says the most agreeable things. Like when she says she didn't know how her sister could go for a boy who's all angles. I don't really get that either - I'll pick the stouter boy nearly every time. But it's just funny that we agree on that. On a somewhat unrelated note, it so sucked that she kept calling Connor's hands "meaty". For whatever reason, that just bothers the crap out of me!

I liked Brady and Connor together - but there's a twist near the end that sort of upsets me. It was very real life, but pretty sad in my opinion.

MARTHA. Let us speak on the subject of Martha, Brady's "friend". It seems like they're not all that great of friends. It's obvious that they have there ups and downs, but.... I wouldn't be having no ups with her. She's a hypocrite and an annoying little bugger and many other things. I have the terrible feels against her. I didn't like her at all!

All in all, The Moment Before was a pretty true to life book, but it didn't really speak to me on a deep level. I still liked it, though! ( )