REVIEW | Leave the World Behind

RATING: 2.5/5

AUTHOR: Rumaan Alam

ISBN: 0062667637

ISBN13: 9780062667632

PUBLISHER: Ecco

RELEASE DATE: October 6th, 2020

PAGES, 241

EDITION LANGUAGE: English

SETTINGS: United Sates

I read this book for the BookTube Prize of 2021, Octafinals Fiction group C.

The book started with an ordinary family trip, where a younger middle-class couple drove to a house in the middle of nowhere with their two children and expecting a long-awaited vacation. But late that night, an elderly black couple show up and said they are the owner of the rental house, and asked to stay because of the blackout in the city. Things started to get peculiar from there. With no internet and cellphone signals, they cannot connect to the outside world and have to solve the strange problems one by one by themselves.

The promise of this book is intriguing, an isolated house, no living men besides each other, strangers with who you have no choice but to live with, teenage children, despair parents. But the characters are rather bland even in this exciting setting. While the book tried to discuss the troublesome stereotypical thinking of race by showing the neglectful perspective of the female protagonist, her views and thoughts provided not enough insights, made her no more than another neglectful person that existed in books. Other topics the author tried to present all got brushed off like that, and it didn’t help when readers can feel the effort that the author wrote deliberately about them.

As a thriller that sets in a short amount of time (a couple of days), the pacing of the book was strongly driven by the thought threads of the characters - mostly family members of the younger household. But a lot of the wandering in the book didn’t click with me, and sometimes, to emphasize the feeling of loss, the thought threads unnecessarily repeat themselves.

The conclusion of the book is unexpected (as a thriller) but in an unsatisfying way.