Everybody just wants a nice, quiet, relaxing vacation.  Especially when you live in the busiest city that never sleeps, New York City.  Amanda and Clay just want to escape the hectic city life and simply get away.  Spend some much deserved quality time with their teenage kids and dip their toes into the expensive lifestyle for a week.

This tranquil silence is shattered when they are confronted by the homeowners of the vacation getaway, informing them of a blackout that has crippled the whole city.  Due to where they are located, this holds much more sinister news.

Is this couple trustworthy, or are they really after something more?  Or will this family stay in the dark, forever.

What the heck did I just read? This is the strangest book. I do think I picked up some of what Alam was aiming for, but I didn’t like the book overall. It’s far too quirky and unrealistic for my taste. Normally, I would’ve just DNF’d it. However, I’m giving Leave the World Behind 2 stars for the vivid imagery and impending sense of doom throughout the book. That hits. It’s successfully propulsive and I wanted to find out what happened. Ultimately, I was disappointed in the ending and feel like my efforts to push through were wasted.

I read this as part of the Barnes and Noble bookclub pick. It provided a lively discussion. I didn't know what was going on at first and I loved all the relationships between two families. How would any of us react to the scenario presented to us in this book. I highly recommend the book.

"I've read Leave the World Behind three times and each time I love it more. 

It took me a while to get used to its voice--it’s outrageously, unapologetically omniscient, a voice that I've more or less been schooled to distrust in this postmodern world. Once I tuned myself to this novel's unique rhythms, though, both the story and the storytelling became explosively alive for me. 

I needed to learn how to read this novel. I needed to overcome my built-in likes and dislikes to fully appreciate its genius. For example, one thing I typically don't have patience for in novels is long lists of stuff. Authors seem to like lists a lot but usually they seem kind of lazy and unnecessary to me. Alam uses this technique to perfection in chapter 3, though, when he lists all the things Amanda puts in her grocery cart. It’s riveting. Each item Amanda chooses off the shelves gives me one more angle to view her character, and by the end I understand her limitations, and her self-image, and the ways she feels most vulnerable. All from a bunch of food items. It's extraordinary writing.

This may be my favorite novel published in 2020. It has won me over. It snuck up on me.

Wow, understated horror! I went from peaceful to paranoid to incredulity to terror! Hard to put down and resonated with me all night.

Novel felt more like a short story you would read in a literary magazine.  I felt 110% uncomfortable the entire time reading it, not because of the uncertainty of the cause and expanse of the apocalypse, but with the actions of the characters.  Feeling very disappointed and duped by the misleading reviews.  

Recommended once to a patron and we both agreed on our review: meh.

A really creepy, unsettling, and intimate book. I blasted through this book, and the ending left me wanting more, but also unable to get the story and characters out of my mind.

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!