A review by mangofandango
Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam

challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

Oof. A hard read, but so riveting that I stayed up late and finished it in just a few days over Christmas. It’s not good Christmas reading! It’s extremely compelling, but also a long stomach ache of anxiety. It’s exactly the kind of story about nuclear war/end of the world/major unprecedented global disaster story that isn’t usually told - what happens when you’re not at the epicenter, when you happen to be in the “right” place (sort of) to not know what has happened but to still know something terrible has happened - and our phones can’t tell us, our TVs can’t tell us, governors can declare states of emergency but can’t tell us about them. How do you cope, what do you do, who do you trust? How do race and class come into play and how can you face the person you are under those kinds of tests? That’s what this book is. Some of the writing made me uncomfortable because it is cringe inducing (like, there’s a lot of weird, cringy bits about genitals specifically?)…but I also really liked many aspects of the writing - the changing perspectives, the omniscient narrator asides, the way the magnitude of what happened (though we don’t know exactly what it is) is communicated through things like migration patterns and optimistic phone chargers… yeah. Clearly I’m in my feelings about this. It’s a lot, but it’s an experience.
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