Review: Leave The World Behind by Rumaan Alam

“Three flamingos lifted out off the pool’s surface with a masculine flaunting of wings. Any flamingo, seeing this, would have wanted to incubate their issue. These were flamingos, the best of flamingos, hale and powerful. They rose into the air, a simple trick, and above the trees. The flamingos on the grass followed, seven human-sized pink birds, twisty and strange, ascending into the Long Island night, beautiful and terrifying in equal measures.”

Leave The World Behind – published by Bloomsbury Publishing, October 6th 2020

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.

Find it on Goodreads.

Verdict: Very much not for me.

⭐⭐

Rating: 1.5 out of 5.

Sometimes I am so in the minority with a book that I am starting to question whether I read the same book as everybody else. This is one of those cases (partly at least, because an abundance of DNF-reviews agrees with me). I did not get on with this. Maybe I should have called it quits when at 15% in, Alam had managed to reference the genitalia of three of the four family members. Snark aside, I was very much the wrong reader for this – where other people read scenes as tense, I found them satirical – and I do not particularly like satire. I found the tone impossible to pin down and as such the reading experience was more frustrating than anything else. Additionally, there were mainly three things that did not work for me: uneven perspective, disdainful characterisation, and a lack of trust in the reader’s intelligence.

Alam chose a omniscient narrator for his story, flitting between his characters’ heads, often within the same paragraph. While this might have worked had the tone been different, here I found this led to a lack of tension and an immense amount of frustration on my end because he chose to keep things artificially hidden from the reader. I would have prefered the narration to be either closer to the two couples or further away, as it was, the sprinkled-in sentences about the outside world took the little bit of tension I felt completely away.

I do not mind unlikable characters (at all, especially when they are women) but I need to feel like the author cares for their characters. Here I felt like I could basically see Alam sneering at his characters and I found that approach unkind – and again leading to my lack of interest in what was going on. He is also weirdly focussed on genitalia in a way that I found frankly baffling – I do not know what purpose the masturbation and sex scenes played for the story and I would have rather not spent this much time reading about a teenager’s penis.

It felt like Alam did not trust his readers to understand subtext or character development. Everything is spelt out, excrutiatingly. So much that I started to wonder if something really obvious was flying over my head. By the time I finished this book, all goodwill I had towards this book based on the incredible premise was lost.

Content warnings: depiction of racism, vomit, loss of teeth, disease on unknown origin, alcohol abuse, spiders

I received an ARC of this book courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The quotations are taken from an unfinished copy and are subject to change.

Mini-Reviews: Literary Fiction novels about female bodies with fabulist elements

The Illness Lesson by Clare Beams

Published by Random House UK, February 6th 2020

I was beyond excited for this book – on paper this sounds like my type of book to the extreme. Its central conceit is a fabulist metaphor, it focusses women and their bodies, and the writing is lyrical enough without being flowery. I think this would have worked a lot better for me had it been a short story. As it was, I did not find it weird enough or realistic enough for me to work. I found the characters indistinct and never got a proper impression of the place – something that would have helped ground me in the world Beams builds here. I am (maybe unfairly) blaming this book for my reading slump because I have been reading it for two months, feeling too guilty to pick up another litfic kind of book and dreading having to pick it back up – so yesterday I decided to just not keep doing that. This is not a bad book and I might have actually rated it 3 stars had I kept with it, but it is very much not the book for me. I struggle with historical fiction and really wish this had been weirder.

My rating: DNF

I received an ARC of this book courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Follow Me to Ground by Sue Rainsford

Published by Random House UK, March 5th 2020

I adored this – the writing, the storyline, the absolute bonkers weirdness, and most of all the wonderful main character. This book is super weird and the prose is flowery enough to sometimes hide what is going on, to really, really work for me. It is also a deeply disturbing book, both in the central imagery of a ground that needs to be fed and of healers opening up their patients and then putting them into the earth to heal and in the casual horror of the main character’s relationship – a horror that Rainsford does not explicate but makes very very obvious nonetheless.

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Content warning: body horror, pedophilia

I received an ARC of this book courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Review: The Changeling – Victor LaValle

Verdict: It’s complicated.

My rating: 3 out of 5 stars.

Published by Canongate, July 5th, 2018

Genre: Fairy-tale Horror.

Find it on Goodreads.

When Apollo Kagwa was just a child, his father disappeared, leaving him with recurring nightmares and a box labelled ‘Improbabilia’. Now a successful book dealer, Kagwa has a family of his own after meeting and falling in love with Emma, a librarian. The two marry and have a baby: so far so happy-ever-after. However, as the pair settle into their new lives as parents, exhaustion and anxiety start to take their toll. Emma’s behaviour becomes increasingly erratic, until one day she commits an unthinkable act, setting Apollo on a wild and fantastical quest through a suddenly otherworldly New York, in search of a wife and child he no longer recognises.

An epic novel for our anxiety-ridden times, The Changeling is a tale of parenthood, love – in its most raw and brutal form – and ultimately, humanity.

I think this book went over my head. I cannot be quite sure but I do think so. I had the overwhelming feeling of just missing something here – and I cannot quite put my finger on what that was. Bear that in mind while I try to figure out my thoughts while writing.

In this book we follow Apollo and his wife both before they meet and after they have had their son. For about a third of the book, there is some menace lurking but mostly the story is whimsical and quite lovely, until suddenly it shifts gears in the most traumatic way possible and Apollo’s life spin out of control.

This book is genre defying in a way I usually absolutely adore – it is fairy-talesque in its whimsy and its frequent re-telling of familiar stories, it is horrifying beyond measure in a way that makes It seem quaint, it is a social commentary cleverly disguised as a page turner, it is a book about family and love and trust and the lengths we can go. And writing this down makes me want to change my rating but ultimately there were long stretches here where the book lost me. I found Apollo a difficult character to root for in the single-mindedness of his approach. He reacts more than he acts (and I like how this mirrors the way Germanic fairy-tales are structured) and flip-flops in his understanding of what is going on in a way that made being so close to him frustrating.

The tonal shift I spoke about earlier first works brilliantly – the silent horror of the earlier scenes are full of foreboding and impressively rendered (I shudder to think of the first scene of Emma receiving a message that then disappears – so simple and so effective) and build the perfect crescendo to that scene (if you read the book you know which one I mean). After that the book seems to lose a bit of steam, important scenes are told in flashbacks, some strands of the story never go anywhere, and the reader is expected to go along for the ride – which sometimes worked better than other times.

I think ultimately my enjoyment or maybe sometimes lack thereof comes down to genre preference. The whole book felt so unfair. And I do not deal well with unfair. It makes me feel anxious and stressed and doesn’t compel me to pick a book up. But nevertheless, this is in parts a brilliant book, with many many clever things I will be mulling over for some time to come.

I received an ARC of this book courtesy of NetGalley and Canongate in exchange for an honest review.

Novella Mini-Review: The Murders Of Molly Southbourne – Tade Thompson

Verdict: Creepy, compulsively readable, unputdownable

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Date read: January 24th, 2018

Published by tor, 2017

Find it on goodreads.

Every time she bleeds a murderer is born. Experience the horror of Tade Thompson’s The Murders of Molly Southbourne.

The rule is simple: don’t bleed.

For as long as Molly Southbourne can remember, she’s been watching herself die. Whenever she bleeds, another molly is born, identical to her in every way and intent on her destruction.

Molly knows every way to kill herself, but she also knows that as long as she survives she’ll be hunted. No matter how well she follows the rules, eventually the mollys will find her. Can Molly find a way to stop the tide of blood, or will she meet her end at the hand of a girl who looks just like her?

I read this in two sittings. That might not sound impressive due to its shortness, but I hardly ever read books, however short, this quickly. But I could not put this down, I needed to keep reading, and I needed to see where Tade Thompson would take this story next. He takes an already brilliant premise and then manages to make the execution an allegory for growing up female in a way that I found surprising. He does not shy away from the most disturbing parts of his premise (like: what happens to the mollys born when Molly is very young?) and the phrase “a slow-growing molly” gave me actual chills.

I don’t read horror often (or at all) but this had me craving more which is quite possibly the highest praise I can think of. While not without its flaws (the novella format does limit the length), I cannot WAIT for the next book in this series to drop. I need to know more about this world and mostly about Molly’s mother, who I found highly interesting and not quite fleshed out enough.

This was a very good start for my forray into the world of novellas.

First sentence: “I wake into a universe defined by pain.”

 

PS: I did have nightmares because of this, make of that what you will.