Leave the World Behind

A fine book, but TBH it was a ‘Skip The Line' book on Libby and I needed an audiobook to listen to when I pounded out some time-sensitive work, and I would not have read it had I known. I thought It was an average thriller and it was a world-ending type of situation, which was not what I was expecting and was very underwhelming. Heard they're making it into a movie and I think I would very much enjoy this in visual form.

The good:Leave the World Behind makes a great book club book. It spurs so many discussions – not necessarily about the book itself, but some of the more significant topics it touches on.

The not great: I honestly don't know if I liked it?

I started off reading the book but was so annoyed by the try-hard writing that I stopped after a few chapters. Since I needed to read it for book club, I switched to the audiobook (If not for book club, I think it would have been a DNF). Marin Ireland does a splendid job narrating, and I enjoyed her performance. It made it easier to overlook the aspects that I was hung up on while reading.

One of our group's main discussions was about the genre of the book. We felt like the book had been misrepresented as a thriller but did not feel like one. It was much more about introspection, character relations - there's a lot of nothing happening while also having a lot of stuff happening?

So, I'd recommend Leave The World Behind if you're looking for a book to discuss. It is sure to spark conversations and polarize your book group!

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you to Ecco Books and Bibliolifestyle for the ARC!

This book has been divisive so far and I love that people are having a love-it-or-hate-it response.

It's #SpookySeason, and surprisingly, LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND fits that bill. I don't normally consider literary speculative fiction spooky, but the way the plot unfurls in this one feels mysterious and unnerving.

While it's a very internal, literary approach to speculative fiction, I couldn't put it down. We start with Amanda and Clay, a white couple renting a luxurious home on a remote part of Long Island. Unlikable yet realistic, they feel like any white, middle-class married couple with kids. In fact, they could be your neighbors.

Then there's a knock at the door, and now we have another couple in the mix – an older and wealthy Black couple, apparently the homeowners. But is that true? Could this older Black couple truly own such an extravagant and gorgeous home?

I love books that transcend genre and I think that's what works so well here. We get a very internal glimpse of what humans think and feel in the middle of a confusing crisis. No one behaves in the way you want them to, or think they should. It's also full of quiet observations about racial microaggressions, class, and the human experience.

The ending is deeply unsettling for some and it leaves a lot open-ended, which I thought worked well. The entire book takes place in a very short timespan and from the narrow perspective of four people in a small, remote area. I kept imagining what was – or wasn't – happening everywhere else.

In this book, a family is vacationing at an AirBnB in a remote part of Long Island when something terrible and mysterious happens. This has the build of a thriller but reads like contemporary fiction with subtle sci-fi. There are some really interesting character dynamics that provide commentary on race, class, and social mores in contemporary American society. I enjoyed it, and to some extent, enjoyed that the author doesn't spoon feed us all the answers; that's truer to the experience of disaster as it's happening. But the details aren't enough to be clear on the big picture, at least on the first read. Perhaps that's intentional but it did leave me wanting.