Quite delightfully, I didn't re-read the synopsis of this novel again before I picked it up to read, and ended up falling into plenty of surprises about a third of the way in. Alam writes fabulously about upper middle class New Yorkers, and his description of a Hamptons vacation home is both droolworthy and aspirational and weirdly sinister (this whole book kind of treads that line, in fact). I highly recommend letting yourself be surprised by this book, though I warn that in this-- a time of world-ending chaos, it seems at times-- the subtle terror of Alam's omniscent narrator's gentle asides are enough to cause a deep unsettled feeling. Enormously effective.

A family vacation is interrupted when the owners of the rented house appear in the middle of the night after a mysterious blackout has shut off power to New York City. Is the blackout just a blackout, or is it part of a larger, more sinister problem facing the country - war, a bomb, a nuclear event or something else?

This dystopian novel is beautifully written and often feels like a fever dream - it gets under your skin and doesn't let go. Tackling issues of race and class, of privilege and fear, this is a knockout of a novel that is both timely and prescient. Readers won't be able to stop thinking about this book's characters and their fates. Gripping. Smart. Scary. Haunting.

Yeah. So this very buzzy book has been on my radar since I got an e-galley several months ago. Though I'm only now getting to read it, I have managed to avoid spoilers or even general plot summaries. I must say that this book is a total surprise to me. It was a total surprise to me from the first quarter to the rest of the book. This is the type of novel that is best experienced as it unfolds as opposed to reading plot summaries and reading through a lot of these reviews, I can tell the readers who have reviewed it understand this. So I'll just say that this book is expertly written and is reminiscent to me of Emily St John Mandel's Station Eleven. Reading it while quarantining and living through the year 2020 has been deeply unsettling, in a way that I think might not have been true during any other year. I do recommend it for people who want an experience.

I'm sorry, I tried hard to like this book, but it just wasn't for me. I have not and will not be reviewing it anywhere besides NetGalley.

The French family is vacationing in a technologically desolate area -- the "ultimate escape" as it's advertised. On their second night in the hideaway, they receive an unexpected knock at the door. It's the owners of the AirBNB, who have escaped the big city after an unexplained power outage. If you thought co-habitating with veritable strangers is the weirdest things to happen to the French, well, not even close. The only thing I can say is "What the...," "how the..." and "come again?" as each unexplainable phenomenon occurs.

I'd recommend this book for people who like stories that leave you feeling unbalanced, but curious to read what comes next.

Not recommended for anyone in quarantine!

I expected to really enjoy this book, but I was unfortunately a bit disappointed. The characters were unlikeable and unchanging in their unlikability. Nothing really happened in the story, beyond an occasional car drive. I wish this book had had a more satisfactory conclusion. I didn't need to know what the big disaster that had happened was, but the clues left by the author felt random and inconsequential. By the end of the book, looking back over the entire story, nothing had really happened.

I was very excited to read and review this book. The synopsis sounded so interesting and I thought this would be a book that would hook me in and have me on the edge of my seat.

Unfortunately it did not do that for me. I ended up not finishing this pretty early into the book. I could not get into the author’s writing style. The author’s writing was too pretentious for me (I typically don’t have a problem with this if it’s done right). The author also used a lot of unnecessary verbiage as if they were trying to make the book longer to reach that certain page count (it shows).

I was hoping to come back to this at another time because I’m really curious as to how this story plays out, but I don’t think I have it in me.

I enjoyed Rich and Pretty by Rumann Alam, so I was glad to have the chance to read Leave the World Behind. This is definitely one of those books where the synopsis only gives the readers a sliver of what the story is about.

It's a slim novel at under 250 pages, but there's a lot to take in. I read that it's being made into a TV adaptation by Netflix, and I think it'll transfer well into that format.

Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book. All thoughts are my own.

Every day could be the end of the world. Or the end of the world is everyday. “Was she supposed to be valiant?” I’ve thought about this question (& this novel) so often since gulping down this e-galley in an ensorcelled haze last month. Images and scenes from this beautiful, dread-filled book will stay with me forever, and it has my favorite kind of ending, with a perfect final paragraph (you know how much comes down to the last line for me!).

Sometimes I get irked when people post about review copies because most of us have to wait so long to read! But you won’t miss this one in October, and here’s hoping hoping hoping it might be a little less stressful to read it then. Thank you for the spectacular heartache, @rumaanalam 🦌🍃

The World As We Don’t Know It

I’m psyched Rumaan Alam has written previous novels because his latest, Leave the World Behind, is one of the best books of 2020--everyone says so and everyone is right. Leave the World Behind feels like 2020: doomy, apocalyptic, full of the unknown and sometimes pure fear. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The novel opens with a family of four driving from Brooklyn to their Airbnb rental home for a week away on Long Island. The house isn’t on the beach but tucked away in a forested area and it is gorgeously renovated. They enjoy a nice 24 hours of vacation before a knock at the door late on the second night changes everything. It’s the older couple that owns the house. A power outage in New York caused them to drive out to the country where there’s power but it seems to be no internet. Cautious and frightened, two families face the unknown world changing without knowing exactly how, why, or the extent of the sonic booms breaking glass, animals crazed, and a random tick bite. Includes cultured racism/classism, house porn, and vacay food. Yum.

Wendy Ward
http://wendyrward.tumblr.com/

Phenomenal premise: a power outage in the greater New York area means that a white family on vacation is confronted by a black couple who claim to own the house they are renting. What follows is 36~ hours of confusion, fear, and the creeping feeling of being left in the dark (ha ha). The execution of the novel is what didn't quite work for this reader. Sparse language where the characters often felt like they were talking -at- each other instead of -to- each other, plus seemingly disconnected and bizarre pieces of the plot left behind a feeling of apathy and disengagement. Clearly this book has an audience and I'm very happy for the people that enjoyed it, but I wasn't one of them.

This book! I was immediately absorbed in the atmosphere and found the tension kept me hooked. Taking place on the precipice of what we are too assume is some sort of apocalyptic scenario felt eerily similar to our current pandemic life. If that seems something that might cause anxiety for you, definitely wait to pick this up. But I found its commentary on class, race, family, parenthood, and marriage to be fascinating. While some might not like an ambiguous ending, I found it to feel very appropriate for the story.

This was a slow burn that drove me slowly crazy in a good way. It subtly examines dark corners of the human psyche and plays into the “what-if” nature of the world today. It kept me engrossed and left me unsettled. I’ve recommended it to all my friends!

I think this will make a great book club selection. I will be recommending it to our library book clubs (and to other people as well!)

This one was a little bit on the slow side at first for me. I appreciated the writing style and the characters. I was expecting to be wowed by this one but I just wasn’t. I was left with way too many questions at the end that I felt didn’t get answered.

LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND by Rumaan Alam shares an eerie story set in the near future when a family heads for vacation only to find that "something" has happened to disrupt communications networks. While there are some obvious parallels to our current uncertain world, I found this rather ominous tale to be a well-written means of escape. Alam's novel was nominated for the National Book Award and called "a brilliant, suspenseful examination of race and class" by The Washington Post's reviewer. And, yes, there are insightful comments: "his wife felt it important, not to do the moral thing necessarily, but to be the kind of person who would. Morality was vanity in the end." And so, the vacationers (a White family) attempt to deal with disruption to the electric grid ("he had not realized how much light connoted safety, and how much dark its opposite") when the when the owners (a Black couple) of the rental property seek refuge there. Apprehensive at first, they gradually come to rely on each other. The somewhat ambiguous ending merely reinforces Alam's exhortation: "To enjoyment .... To the enjoyment of any moment in life, I guess. Enjoying any moment is a victory. I think we need to hold on to those." LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND received starred reviews from Booklist, Kirkus, and Publishers Weekly.

I'm not surprised I enjoyed this this novel. I've been hearing my fellow readers sing high praise for "Leave the World Behind". Rumaan Alam's writing was effortless and haunting. This book drifted in my thoughts when I wasn't reading it. I always felt this insatiable need to finish the story. If you are looking for something unputdownable this it it. Wow.. I'll be left reeling for days.

What just happened? Who has read this and did you feel the same? I don’t know if I loved it but I think I did! The more I think about the story the more I love it and appreciate everything in it. The ending threw me for a loop though!! What a ride!

I began this book with no expectation of the tension and suspense that awaited me as I turned the pages. Especially during this year of pandemic, it seemed very relevant and completely believable. The couples' reluctance to trust any one while protecting their own families was truly felt. This was definitely a book to be read in 2020.

This book is definitely one you either vibe with or don’t. I guess I vibed with it, but I won’t say I loved it. I couldn’t put it down (except for the period of time called November where I got very little reading done), but I didn’t finish the book with a longing to read it again—my telltale sign that I loved a book.

Leave the World Behind is visceral. It is cerebral. It is atmospheric. I totally get why so many people didn’t enjoy it. It is not heavy on the character development and there is actually very little plot, in the grand scheme of things. But I found myself on the edge of my seat wanting to know what happened next. I wanted to know what the next revelation was. I wanted to look into this little crystal ball of a book to see what was going to come of the world, both in the book and in real life. Sometimes fiction follows real life, and reading this around the time of the election was a little too much to handle.

I have 2 major qualms with this book, however. The first being that the author seemed to mention the 13 year old daughter’s body far too much. Was there a message there that I missed? It just seemed that the author NEEDED us to know this 13 year old girl still had “baby fat” and wasn’t chiseled and that is just such a tired “character description” to me. Why do we need to know what a female character’s body looks like to understand her? Newsflash: we don’t!

My second qualm was the mention of schizophrenic as an insult a number of times. “Kids were merely too young to know to look away from the inexplicable. Kids stared at the raving schizophrenic...” Not only does the author call schizophrenia inexplicable as if it were this strange thing that can’t be talked about or accepted, but he then chose to use the word raving. Apparently there is no better way to say that kids acknowledge things and people who are different, while adults “know” to treat them as if they simply didn’t exist. I’m sure this didn’t rub everyone the wrong way, but I was not happy with the use of a medical condition, particularly an individual who we can assume would be having a mental health crisis based upon the description, as a metaphor in this way.

So, did I like it? Did I enjoy it? Would I recommend it? Who’s to say, really? I will say that this is one you definitely need to read to decide for yourself.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for access to this e-arc.