rumaan alam leave the world behind review

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.Īlam chose a omniscient narrator for his story, flitting between his characters’ heads, often within the same paragraph.

I found the tone impossible to pin down and as such the reading experience was more frustrating than anything else. 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. 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. This is one of those cases (partly at least, because an abundance of DNF-reviews agrees with me). 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. Leave the World Behind explores how our closest bonds are reshaped-and unexpected new ones are forged-in moments of crisis. Suspenseful and provocative, Rumaan Alam’s third novel is keenly attuned to the complexities of parenthood, race, and class. 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? 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. They bring the news that a sudden blackout has swept the city. are an older black couple-it’s their house, and they’ve arrived in a panic. But a late-night knock on the door breaks the spell. 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 2020Ī magnetic novel about two families, strangers to each other, who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrongĪmanda 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. They rose into the air, a simple trick, and above the trees. These were flamingos, the best of flamingos, hale and powerful. Any flamingo, seeing this, would have wanted to incubate their issue. “Three flamingos lifted out off the pool’s surface with a masculine flaunting of wings.

Rumaan alam leave the world behind review