REVIEW: LEAVE ME, BY GAYLE FORMAN

 

 

 

Maribeth Klein was a multi-tasker. She had to be, juggling her very fast-paced job as an editor at a Manhattan celebrity lifestyle magazine, with her wife and mothering duties. The twins, Liv and Oliver, were four years old, and their preschool demanded a lot of her attention, too.

So when the pain hit Maribeth on a busy afternoon, she rationalized it away. It had to be something like indigestion, or the anger she was feeling toward her husband over something-or-other, or some other possibility. If she hadn’t already had an appointment with her OB/GYN for a mammogram, who knows what would have happened? They sent her to the ER, where she was told she’d had a heart attack and would need a stent. But somehow, that procedure failed, due to a nick in an artery, and she had to have a double bypass.

Home again a few days later, Maribeth is struggling. Those who were supposed to help her are somehow failing in that task, and her frustration leads to an action she could never have imagined she would take. She packed, withdrew cash from her account, the one with her inheritance in it, and took a train. To Pittsburgh.

Her anonymous journey and life in a strange city, in the subsequent weeks, would become a time of reflection, trying out her wings, and exploring the past. And trying to find her birth mother, because Maribeth had been adopted. Suddenly the need for some genetic history seemed necessary.

I loved Leave Me, which I could not put down. When I enjoy the characters in a novel, with their flaws, secrets, and unexplained behaviors, I find it almost impossible to stop reading. At first I decided I didn’t like Maribeth’s husband Jason. He had, after all, not been available to her, physically or emotionally. And then there was that time when they were first together, before they married, when he had just moved across the country. His poor communication skills could easily be misunderstood, of course, so what must happen to make it possible for the two of them to reconnect? And how will Maribeth’s somewhat detached relationship with her former best friend and boss, Elizabeth, start to heal?

I thoroughly enjoyed how someone like Maribeth, used to a life full of lists and technology, found a way to live a less pressured life, with no Smart Phone, laptop, or even a car. Using the library for its computers, and accepting the “kindness of strangers,” like her next door neighbors, became her new normal. A delightfully incredible read with a rating of:

***My e-ARC came to me from the publishers via NetGalley.