When the World Tips Over

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes references to mental illness, and substance use.

Dizzy Fall, 12, is hurt by a recent break with her best friend, Lizard. Dizzy longs to have a sexual awakening like she’s read about in a romance novel her mother has, Live Forever Now. After a classmate picks on her, Dizzy runs away from her middle school. The town of Paradise Springs is quiet and empty during the heat waves. Dizzy steps out in front of an 18-wheeler, when suddenly a girl, “bright and shining,” a “shooting star of a girl” (9) with rainbow-colored hair, tosses her out of the way. Dizzy is glad she’s not a ghost like the ones she sees in the vineyard. When the girl bops Dizzy on the nose, “[a]ll Dizzy’s panic and uncertainty about everything had vanished” (11).

Dizzy tries to tell her brother, Perfect Miles, that she met an angel. Dizzy loves her older brother, Wynton, whom she let sneak into the house even though Chef Mom—the name they use for their mother, who works as a chef—kicked him out for crashing her truck and getting thrown in jail. Dizzy doesn’t understand Miles, even though she reads his notes to himself and sometimes hears him crying in his sleep.