So if you were online at an point in late 2023, you probably remember seeing an ad where Julia Roberts and her family were on a beach vacation and an oil tanker got closer and closer and closer and closer to the beach until it ran right up onto the shore. I never watched the film Leave the World Behind and it wasn’t until after I finished reading Rumaan Alam’s novel and looked up some information about it that I realized where the film came from. No wonder why the title sounded familiar when I picked it up at the library sale.

By the way, the tanker scene is not in the novel.

The premise of this book is that parents Amanda and Clay and their children, Archie and Rose, are renting a house out at Montauk one summer. Sometime during their vacation, an old Black couple–George and Ruth–appear on their doorstep. They own the house and have come out there from Manhattan because there has been a massive blackout. Soon, the wifi and all other connectivity dies, there’s suggestions that it’s a major catastrophe due to Emergency Broadcast System messages and messed up news websites, and the six of them find themselves stranded in the beach house. Oh, and there are very strange animal movements–massive number of deer and flamingos show up at one point or another. And after being bitten by a tick, Archie gets really sick and loses all of his teeth. The question becomes: are they going to make it out of this okay?

I really wanted to like this book because the premise was interesting. The idea of everything in the world being cut off and having to deal with the claustrophobia when you used to be so connected is fascinating and can make for some great tension. But with the exception of the kids, the characters are not likeable nor are they that interesting, and for some reason the author has this fixation on them thinking about sex. No, like really. I get scenes where the parents are having vacation sex, but it seems like he’s under the impression that everyone thinks about having sex or what it will be like when their kids are having sex. It’s weird and quite frankly an immature way of writing.

Anyway, this could have been a lot better and just felt trope-y and annoyingly odd.

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