Leave Me by Gayle Forman

It's the beginning of summer and I was looking for a light read to get my foggy brain through the heat, so I picked up Leave Me by Gayle Forman. Although it was about a woman who runs away from her family, for some reason it was giving me easy-read vibes.

The book opens with Maribeth Klein suffering a heart attack. She's only in her early forties, a working married woman with young twins. She's literally got so much on her plate that, at first, she doesn't realize that she's suffering from heart failure. But after she's got herself to the hospital, undergone a bypass, and returned home to recuperate, things start to really spiral. Her husband promised her a bubble of solitude in which to recover, but admits on the drive home that he's invited her mother to stay and "help". Then the twins demand her attention, as she's been away for a few days. Her husband has a huge work project and is trying to be there for Maribeth, but she doesn't believe he's doing as much as he can to help. It's all just too much. The stresses pile up one on top of the other and become an insurmountable obstacle.

Maribeth loses it.

She goes to bed crying. She wakes up the next morning, walks out of her house and boards a train. She finds herself in Pittsburgh.

I was looking for a beach read, but the reality of these fictional stressors unexpectedly began to eat away at me a bit. There are scenes involving lice that actually gave me two back-to-back nightmares about creepy crawlies in my hair. Really, what I thought was going to be a lighthearted novel actually has quite a lot of stressful situations throughout. I felt bad for the kids. I felt bad for Maribeth. I felt bad for Steven. (Steven was not Maribeth's husband.)

I wondered - was she ever going to return to her regular life? Does running away from your problems actually help solve them? Add to all of this some implausible reactions, some loose ends that tidied themselves up a little too neatly, and the whole plot started to feel a little far-fetched. That said, the pace was quick and I still eagerly picked it up to find out what would happen next.

A heart attack is the failure of the heart to function properly, resulting in injury to the heart or death. This is the main event that kicked off the series of reactions and repercussions, but it was also a subtext, examining Maribeth's capacity for giving and receiving love. Her heart was literally broken...and she felt it would take nothing less than drastic action on her part to try to mend it.

Judge the cover: 2/5