A magnetic novel about two families, strangers to each other, who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrong
Amanda and Clay head out to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a vacation: a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter, and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they’ve rented for the week. But a late-night knock on the door breaks the spell. Ruth and G. H. are an older black couple—it’s their house, and they’ve arrived in a panic. They bring the news that a sudden blackout has swept the city. But in this rural area—with the TV and internet now down, and no cell phone service—it’s hard to know what to believe.
Should Amanda and Clay trust this couple—and vice versa? What happened back in New York? Is the vacation home, isolated from civilization, a truly safe place for their families? And are they safe from one another?
Suspenseful and provocative, Rumaan Alam’s third novel is keenly attuned to the complexities of parenthood, race, and class. Leave the World Behind explores how our closest bonds are reshaped—and unexpected new ones are forged—in moments of crisis.
There are SPOILERS in this review, please do not click through if you don't want to be spoiled!
....what did I just read?
First things first. The language is lyrical and involved; Rumaan has obviously thought very carefully about every sentence in here. The language is thoughtful and absorbing.
The story is intriguing, but it's a strange mix between not enough being explained to us and too much being explained to us. The characters have no way of gaining any information about what's happening anywhere outside the house. That's fine; that's a great idea, actually, an apocalypse at ground level, so to speak. But the narration breaks off every so often to tell us about people drowning in the subways of New York, or that the man who ran their laundromat is trapped in a lift and will die 'many hours in the future', things that the characters can't possibly know. Point of view seems to jump between characters in the same scene, too, which can be confusing.
The narration makes a point of telling us that one character was bitten by a tick, so we're expecting illness, a staple of apocalypse. The actual illness doesn't seem to have anything to do with the tick, though. Misdirection is classic in writing, but this feels like straight up lying.
And of course, the ending. It doesn't; it stops instead, with nothing solved, even the minor problems of the moment. (Sick character on the way to hospital, missing child; neither is resolved by the end.) Life isn't always wrapped up neatly, of course, but books stopping instead of finishing is a peeve of mine. Maybe there's going to be another novel to wrap things up.
The language is good, the story idea is clever, but the execution just didn't work for me personally.
BE AWARE this novel contains sexual language and situations.
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