Leave Me by Gayle Forman

Our students definitely enjoy and ask for novels by Gayle Forman like If I Stay, Where She Went and Just One Day so I was excited to see her new novel, Leave Me. It, too, will be popular, but more likely with faculty and staff than with students.  This is because the main character, Maribeth, is a forty-something working Mom who has a heart attack and actually decides to leave her family in order to physically and emotionally recover.

I found portions of this book to be very insightful; my favorite quote was “That’s when I figured out the ugly secret of a mother’s love: You protect them, to protect yourself.”  Forman did a great job of conveying the pressures of motherhood, marriage and full-time employment although I did have some difficulty believing that Maribeth would disappear so completely from the lives of her young children, Liv and Oscar. Very tempting, though, and maybe it is meant to be related somehow to Maribeth’s own situation as an adoptee and her later in life efforts to find her birth mother?  Forman has won awards for her teen novels and Leave Me will nicely fill an “escapist” niche with older audiences who will delight in this very quick, fun read. Kirkus aptly called Leave Me “an appealing fairy tale for the exhausted and underappreciated” and Booklist gave it a starred review.