Young & Jaded: Laura Weiss's "Leftovers"
- Christine
- Sep 6, 2015
- 2 min read
Just because summer is over doesn’t mean the book reviews have to stop! As a bookie, I love to talk about books. I love to read books, write about books, talk about books, shop for books, and well, pretty much anything that has to do with books, unless it’s buying textbooks. Let’s face it. Does anyone like buying textbooks? I think that’s a unanimous no.
Anywho, I recently read Leftovers by Laura Weiss, with incredibly high expectations, I might add. I read a book buy her in the past, and sobbed hysterically at the ending. (For those of you who are looking for a book that invokes such intense crying, the book is called How It Ends and I highly recommend it.) Anyway, Leftovers did not quite live up to my expectations. While the book was good enough to keep me interested, I couldn’t quite figure out the plot. Even in the end, it didn’t seem to me like that’s where the book was going. And not in the “Oh my goodness what an amazing plot twist!” kind of way. It was more of a “hmm, you know that’s not quite what the book was leading up to.” If you’re wondering, I thought someone was going to die. No one died. Not to say what happened wasn’t a traumatic and terrible thing, it just wasn’t what I anticipated based off the foreshadowing.
On the other hand, the book gleaned how two people with incredibly different upbringings can be lead down the same road to destruction, and how these people’s lives can become so intertwined that their tragedies becomes one. This dynamic is not one found in many young adult books, and in that respect Weiss takes a complicated, but very real aspect of life, and relays it in a beautiful way: two best friends whose lives change and expand, drawing them back together no matter how far they drift apart. Despite Weiss’s complicated, and somewhat disappointing plot, the characters were so well developed, and so real, that it made up for it in a sense. Few authors are able to capture what it is to be a teenage girl navigating her way through public school and a not-so-nice world that comes along with it.
While I am not sure I’d recommend this book to someone, I think the book struck a chord within me, ringing some truth and allowing me to reflect on my own experiences going through high school and how those experiences have jaded me, something that I thought about, but never knew how to characterize.
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