After The Sudden Departure, a day in which thousands of people vanished out of thin air, the Garvey family struggles and fails to return to the life they remember. Laurie joins a religious group, and son Tom takes off to follow a sketchy profit who believes in the healing power of hugs. All that’s left of the family is Kevin and his teenage daughter Jill, though they both are just figments of the people they used to be before the event.
I’m not sure why I’ve never read Tom Perrotta before, but after reading The Leftovers, I really want to get my hands on his other books. If The Leftovers is any indication of his talent, Perrotta may just be in the running of one of my favorite authors.
It’s actually strange that I loved this book as much as I did. The subject matter was not something I’d typically read. In fact, I’m fairly certain I’ve passed up this book in libraries and bookstores prior to finally picking it up. It is also surprising that I loved the book as much as I did as I found the majority of the characters to be extremely frustrating and hard to understand. In other circumstances, I may have ended up hating them, and hating the book…but The Leftovers was written so well that although I wanted to strangle everyone’s neck…at the same time I was desperate to see what happened to them.
The sole reason I gave this book four stars instead of five was because of the end. It’s a personal preference. I like books, especially non serial books to have a solid ending. I do not like loose ends. Even if the ending is messy or depressing…I prefer to know for sure how something plays out. The Leftovers was not one of those books. In fact, it ended right in the middle of what seemed like a major turning point and left me so frustrated that I either threw the book out the car window (not a good option) or take away a rating star.
